The Circle Game (1970)
One of the most recognisable songs of Mitchell’s early canon, The Circle Game was written as a response to her friend and fellow Canadian Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain. Speaking in concert in London in 1970, Mitchell said: “[Young] wrote this song that was called 'Oh to live on sugar mountain' which was a lament for his lost youth. And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game." As the last track on Ladies of the Canyon, following the intense, unsettling Woodstock, The Circle Game also acts as something of a bookend to Mitchell’s early folk career. Its singsong, almost nursery-rhyming melody and hippyish lyrical sentiments would be all-but replaced by the more challenging, confessional and cathartic songs on Blue. James Lachno
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Credit: HULTON ARCHIVE
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