A Case of You

Mitchell wrote it in or before 1970, and the lines she sang in early performances changed in six places before the album. One line alludes to Caesar's speech in Julius Caesar, and another was inspired by Rilke. She cut a demo at A&M in September 1970, later issued on the second Archives volume and the Blue 50 EP. The album take was recorded at A&M in early 1971, with Mitchell on Appalachian dulcimer and vocal, James Taylor on acoustic guitar in standard tuning and Russ Kunkel on drums. It was the last of the album's songs to pair her percussive dulcimer with Taylor's guitar.

Timothy Crouse wrote in Rolling Stone in 1971 that its verses and chorus split its ambivalence neatly between them. It was the B-side of California rather than a single, yet Rolling Stone ranked it 26th among the greatest songs of all time in 2021, and Desert Island Discs listeners voted it the top song by a woman. Mitchell refused it to the 2013 film that took its name, but it has been heard in Truly, Madly, Deeply, sung by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, and in Practical Magic.

The upload in the hypersongs web is the Blue studio take in the 2021 Bernie Grundman remaster.

Live

setlist.fm logs it 80 times, her fifth most played song. She closed her Isle of Wight set with it in August 1970, sang it at the Amchitka benefit in Vancouver and on BBC In Concert with Taylor that autumn, and played it solo for Miles of Aisles in 1974. She sang it as a guest of the Rolling Thunder Revue in Bangor, Maine, in 1975, played it through the 1983 tour, and recut it with orchestra for Both Sides Now in 2000. It returned at Newport in 2022, with Marcus Mumford singing on the released recording, and at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2024.

Covers

Hundreds of artists have recorded it. Prince, a lifelong fan, recorded it as A Case of U for One Nite Alone (2002) and the Nonesuch tribute of 2007. An early 1980s piano demo surfaced on Piano & a Microphone in 2018, and he played it in Atlanta a week before his death in 2016. James Blake's 2011 version, Diana Krall's solo piano reading and Ana Moura's 2012 recording, produced by Larry Klein, are among the many others.