"River" by Joni Mitchell

Sometimes you just want to skate away on....

I discovered Joni Mitchell in 1999, right in the thick of the Britney era. A time when teen movies were selling a version of youth that was so sparkly and picture-perfect it was insulting. Bandanas doubled as tops, hip bones were fashion accessories, yoga pants flared like bell-bottoms, and watching Total Request Live made me feel old at 17. It wasn’t that I was a teenage snob (well, maybe a little bit), I just didn’t want my pop culture moments to reek of plastic. I wanted music made by humans. I wanted lyrics without catchphrases, singers who kept their clothes on and still managed to break my heart, and live performances that didn’t need dancers to distract you from how shitty the song was.

For that bare-bones experience I craved, I turned to Joni Mitchell.

Back then her used records sat in the bins for a dollar ninety-nine apiece; covers creased, edges soft, the original owner’s name scrawled in faded ink on the back. These days the same worn copies can run twenty-five dollars or more, making 1999 a halcyon time for a teen to collect the classics on her One-Hour Photo minimum wage salary.

Of all my Joni finds, Blue was the one that lived closest to the turntable, and “River” was the track I played until the grooves must have worn thin. The song never really left me. Years later it slipped into my second novel, Somewhere in Hollywood, where my main character is in the courtyard and hears those first spare piano notes drifting down from her soulmate’s apartment—just as she discovers a litter of stray kittens. She keeps one, names her Joni, and the melody lingers through the rest of the story in the same quiet way it has in my life.

I’ve always had a poetic attachment to the song in both real-life and fiction, but this week, the poetry took a sharp comedic turn, with the iconic song at the center of the laugh track.

Twenty-six years after I first dropped the needle on Blue—meaning last week—my voice coach invited me to sing at a little Christmas concert in the village library here in France. The thought of singing inside an old stone library with dark oak shelves lined with authors from Voltaire to Baudelaire felt like something out of a dream, so I said yes before I could think twice. I offered “River,” a song that feels like Christmas but has always felt bigger than the season, a meditation on longing, perfect for these December days when not everyone is feeling merry and bright.

Because my lessons are private, I had no idea who the other performers would be. Over the months at my school, I’d heard an opera singer, a baroque tenor, musical-theatre belters, the occasional Italian aria. I figured my Joni Mitchell number would be a gentle pop interlude among all the highbrow falsettos.

Famous last thoughts.

We arrived Wednesday evening for the concert. My son wore a tie and jacket; my husband, armed with his phone, ready to capture his wife’s sad-yet-festive holiday moment. The dreamy literary atmosphere I’d pictured (you know, the shelves and literary luminaires and all that) turned out to be Ikea cubbies stuffed with worn children’s books. But fine, I thought—I’m visual to a fault and I was still in a library in a picturesque French village.

Then the librarian told my son to set up on the “stage” once they moved the brightly-colored story-hour poufs.

That was when the room tilted.

And everything seemed to move in slow motion as I scanned for the other performers. The opera singer? The baroque tenor? Anyone over the age of twelve? Not a crow’s foot in sight. The other performers tuning tiny violins and adjusting music stands were all of eight, maybe ten years old. And the audience was their parents, meaning people my age, and several of them I recognized from my son’s school.

In my metallic open-toe heels, I shuffled over to my music teacher and told her maybe it would be best if I sat this one out; I didn’t want to come across as some stage mom making up for lost time. Like move over kids, now it’s my turn to sing? The horror. My teacher, however, didn’t seem to think it was a problem. Nor did my husband, where I was like, is this a cultural thing? Because where I come from, we make fun of people like this. This was when my usual performance nerves upgraded to total mortification. I was about to sing an iconic Christmas breakup song, with some rather grown-up lyrics to a room full of children. Backing out minutes before, though, would have made it worse, and would focus even more attention on me. How would I have even explained in frantic French that I was withdrawing because I was the only adult and felt ridiculous and my song was inappropriate?

But it was too late. The violinist played and before I knew it my name was called. The pianist starting “River” at funeral tempo, much slower than Joni’s version, stretching the agony by a full minute. I pushed out the first lyric: It’s comin’ on Christmas/They’re cuttin’ down trees—a line I’ve sung a thousand times in my car, in the shower, in my head, but suddenly felt awkward in my mouth, like I was making the words up as I went. My voice was the only sound in the room, which for a singer is heaven but for a writer is the equivalent of the naked-at-school nightmare. The more I thought about it, the more it quivered. I stared at the parquet floor, wishing I really could skate away. With no guitar to hide behind, no Brian May riff to save me, I had to painfully accept that it was just me, the song, and polite parents waiting for this lady to get off the “stage” so they can see their kid. But I got through it. Hit some notes, murdered others, took the smattering of applause, and lived to share the tale.

That’s the thing about music: it has nine lives. For me “River” has gone from the private anthem of a forlorn teenager who felt alien in her own generation to a winter’s song longing for meaning amid the sparkle of the season, to most recently the public humiliation of an expatriate mother making a spectacular fool of herself in small-town France. Seventeen-year-old me probably imagined a far more enchanting arc, but at least I got the poetic version down on paper in my novel. In real life I’m still here, commiserating with Joni, wishing I too could skate away on that river. And in my hand, another story about how music makes us who we are, the good, the bad, and the absolutely mortifying.