Teach my feet to fly

We listened to a couple of Quebecoises yesterday, so today we’ll feature another Canadian songwriter. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “River” (on a compilation CD) it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. Yes—that’s what Christmas is like, when you’re not aligned with your expectations, when you’ve screwed the pooch in a relationship, when you just can not get into the rhythm of the season—whatever that might mean to you.

I love the imagery of a river not as something that lets you sail, but something that you can skate away on. It captures the dislocation that a Northerner feels in an environment like Los Angeles. Even though that’s my native land, I understand fully the sense that it’s not quite real, more façade than substance, and how that adds to the alienation.

There are many covers of “River”, but I like Linda Ronstadt’s the best, so that’s what I’m sharing with you.