Songfacts®:

• "Twisted" is the last song on Joni Mitchell's album Court and Spark, released in 1974. It is a cover of a jokey jazz tune about psychoanalysis first performed by jazz chanteuse Annie Ross in 1952 and re-recorded by her trio Lambert, Hendrix and Ross in 1960 (the version Mitchell knew). It is the first non-original song to grace a Joni Mitchell album.
• In 1952, Prestige Records owner Bob Weinstock asked Annie Ross to write lyrics to a jazz solo, a practice that would later be called vocalese. Wasting no time, Ross turned saxophonist Wardell Gray's 1949 "Twisted" into a vocal showstopper, presenting it to him the very next day. Her lyrics humorously describe an insane narrator's experiences with psychoanalysis.
  
  "I went through analysis for a while this year," Mitchell told Malka Marom in 1973 about her cover. "I felt I wanted to talk to someone about confusion, which we all have. Since it's a song about analysis, I feel that I earned the right to sing it."
• Mitchell invited the stoner comic duo Cheech & Chong to provide some spoken interjections ("Man, the chick is twisted. Crazy ... should be. Here ... flip city.")
  
  Cheech Marin, who performed the spoken-word part with Tommy Chong, told Mojo magazine: "She called us and said, 'You know that song twisted?' I said, 'Yeah, I know it real well. She said, 'Well I'd like you and Tommy to come in and do a little Interlude in the break. You think you can do that?' 'Yeah, sure. No problem.' So we went right in and had a good old time. It was easy. I think we just did one or maybe two takes at the most. But it was a good fit for us. I don't think she gave us any direction. The only thing she said was 'Go!'"
• Other artists who have covered "Twisted" include:
  
  Bette Midler on her 1973 self-titled album
  Carol Kaye on her 1984 album The First Lady of the Bass
  Crystal Waters on her 1991 album Surprise
  Danielle Blanchard on her 2001 album Jazz Portrait
  Christiane Noll on her 2016 album Live at the West Bank Café
• Woody Allen used Annie Ross' original recording of the song in the introduction to his 1997 film Deconstructing Harry.