“River” by Joni Mitchell

"River" turns up on Blue, Joni Mitchell's fourth album, released in 1971, and it's a holiday song almost by accident. Mitchell wrote it at the piano and plays it there herself, producing the track with Henry Lewy engineering, and the whole thing rests on her voice and those keys. The song is about being far from home and at the end of a love affair; Christmas is only the setting, the time of year that makes both feel worse.

It was never released as a single, and it never needed to be. Other singers have recorded it more than a thousand times, making it the second most-covered song in her catalog, and it has quietly become a Christmas standard all the same. In 2021 Rolling Stone placed it at 247 on its list of the 500 best songs of all time.

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