“California” by Joni Mitchell

"California" is Joni Mitchell writing home from abroad, and on Blue, her 1971 album, it reads like a postcard that turned into a confession. She called it a letter back home and wrote it on the move: the first verse in Paris, the second in Spain, and the last once she was back in California, the creative climate she'd been pining for the whole trip.

It's a stream-of-consciousness travelogue, France to a Greek island to Spain, and every stop ends with the same homesick pull, from a woman who counted herself part of the counterculture and missed the place anyway. The real-life Carey, from the single it followed, drifts through the second verse. Mitchell produced it and plays Appalachian dulcimer, with James Taylor on guitar, Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel and Russ Kunkel on drums.

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