“Both Sides Now” by Judy Collins

Judy Collins beat Joni Mitchell to her own song. Collins cut one of the earliest recordings of "Both Sides Now", and her version was on the US singles chart in the fall of 1968, a year before Mitchell put it on her own album, Clouds.

The song began in midair. Mitchell has said she was reading Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King on a flight, came to a passage where the hero, also flying, looks down at clouds, then glanced out her own window, saw clouds of her own and started writing on the spot. In Collins's hands that cloud-watching reverie becomes folk rock with its head in the sky.

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