Clouds by Joni Mitchell

Clouds, Joni Mitchell's second album, came out on Reprise on May 1, 1969, a year after Song to a Seagull had gotten the Canadian songwriter plenty of notice. She cut it at A&M Studios in Hollywood and produced most of it herself, with Paul A. Rothchild also in the credits, and she painted the cover as well: a self-portrait with a red prairie lily, the provincial flower of Saskatchewan.

It's a spare, intimate record built around that high, supple voice, and her songs about lovers and much else move through harmonies that bend in directions folk music doesn't usually go. The real news is that she finally sings her own "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now", songs other singers had recorded first, and hearing the writer take them back is something else. It reached number 22 in Canada and 31 in the States, and in time it went gold.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.