Both Sides, Now

Mitchell has said that she wrote it on a plane while reading Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, whose hero looks down at clouds from a plane. She looked out of the window, saw clouds too, and began writing. She explained in a 1967 interview that she had dreamed at the clouds from both sides. The song is in an open tuning of D-A-D-F#-A-D.

Judy Collins made the first recording, on her 1967 album Wildflowers. Released as a single in October 1968, it reached 8 on the American pop chart and won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance. Mitchell disliked that recording. Her own version appeared on Clouds in 1969, and Neil Diamond and Willie Nelson recorded it as well.

In 2000 she recorded it again with an orchestral arrangement by Vince Mendoza, which won him a Grammy. She sang it with a 70-piece orchestra at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York that April. That version is heard in the film Love Actually. Rolling Stone ranked the song 170th in 2004, and she performed it at the Kia Forum on 30 January 2025 for FireAid.