“Chelsea Morning” by Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell wrote "Chelsea Morning" on her own and cut it for Clouds, her second album, released in 1969, singing it and playing the guitar herself. The song grew out of her room in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, and it takes its light, quite literally, from the apartment's décor.

Back in Philadelphia she and some friends had strung up a mobile made of colored glass picked off the street and bent coat-hanger wire, and it threw the window light all around the room. At coffeehouse gigs she'd explain that the glass had been pulled from the windows of a home for unwed mothers that had since been torn down. Her painter's eye is all over the thing. By 1996 Mitchell was cool on it, calling it sweet but not among her best, a keepsake from the days before any record deal.

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