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• 1 2025-05-16T11:53:59-04:00 "River" by Joni Mitchell, contributed by Elyse Goncalves (2025) 2 plain 2025-05-16T11:55:40-04:00
  
  I chose the song “River” by Joni Mitchell to add to our Scalar site. I personally love this song. It’s quite beautiful and plays on an interesting juxtaposition between loss and the holidays. In the song, Mitchell discusses the loss of her love, who left her in the winter while she was three months pregnant. Once she gave birth, Mitchell put the child up for adoption. The song starts with the motif to Jingle Bells, drawing listeners into the idea that the song is cheerfully about Christmas. But Mitchell quickly cuts their expectations short with a discussion of the fact that she wants to skate away on a river from Christmas. While she lives in California now and wrote the song there, the music places her back in that cold winter when her then-husband left her. However, she also talks about how, in the loss of her husband, she lost the “best baby I've ever had,” which I understand as a reference to losing her child. Mitchell has left the cold behind and is past this scene, but still in some ways regrets giving her child up for adoption and losing her husband. By setting the song at Christmastime, Mitchell conveys just how devastating this loss is: she wants to leave a beautiful time of year that she can no longer enjoy, since she’s filled with guilt. The song is beautifully devastating, and I feel depicts a loss—one that I could never imagine experiencing—in a way that I can understand.