The Last Time I Saw Richard

With All I Want, it was the last song Mitchell wrote for Blue. It went into the running order after she had Reprise halt the first pressing, taking the place of Hunter and Urge for Going, and it closes the album. No other musician is credited on it: Mitchell sings and plays piano.

She told Michelle Mercer, for the 2009 book Will You Take Me As I Am, that the folk singer Patrick Sky said to her in a New York bar that she was a hopeless romantic with only one way to go, which was "hopeless cynicism". That, she said, was where the song came from, and she added that Sky married a figure skater and stopped coming to the bar. The two had shared bills in the 1960s. Sky died in Asheville, North Carolina, in May 2021, aged 77.

Timothy Crouse found it a memoir of her café days crowded with small details. The Daily Telegraph in 2015 called it one of the two greatest songs on the album. The upload in the hypersongs web is the studio recording from Blue.

Live and later

setlist.fm logs 25 performances, all in 1974 and 1979. On Miles of Aisles she plays it with the L.A. Express in a version from August 1974, and a 1979 performance at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens is on the fourth Archives volume. She recorded it again for Travelogue in 2002 with orchestral arrangements by Vince Mendoza, and the Detroit Free Press singled out the new version's opening line.