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Weekly I participate in a meme called Old School Friday (OSF). I'd seen it around the Net for a while and thought, I should do that. God knows I should. Like most of us, my life has a soundtrack running through it, as one of the bloggers and creators of OSF said of herself in comments on a post. I'm squarely in midlife, and the soundtrack of my life is old school music.
Yet, each stage of our lives probably has a different soundtrack. During midlife it skips back to songs from our youth and then forward again to music that resonates with transition and change and sometimes even to fresh love ballads with fresh heartbreak blues. Our midlife soundtrack may be muse, tormentor, or healer, sometimes all three at once.
One of these midlife tracks suddenly appeared on my MP3 player last week. I don't mean that it mysteriously added itself. I mean that I uploaded it from my collection with a batch of other songs and forgot about it, and then, as I was making coffee one morning about to begin a day of writing, I heard the singer singing, "caught in the middle/Carol, we're middle class/we're middle-aged/we were wild in the old days/birth of rock 'n roll days."
It was Joni Mitchell, and I was struck by the thought that I'd listened to this woman in my preteen and teen years (1969-1979), thinking one day I too would have a man leaving in a "Big Yellow Taxi" because it seemed, as she sang it, to be some kind of rite of passage. I'd also listened to lots of vinyl Motown growing up, thinking some day love would come like a Temptations or Smokey Robinson tune, but that didn't quite pan out the way I'd hoped.
In 1969, Mitchell released her Clouds album and I probably heard "Both Sides Now." It's a mystery how, though, since I was only 9 and my family listened to R&B or news stations mostly. I'm thinking I heard it one night hiding under the covers with my transistor radio when I was supposed to be asleep, yes, on one of those nights when I was sneaking music instead of a book.
However, I imbibed that song in 1978, feeling this woman Mitchell must be a fortune teller because I'd met a boy, went splat, and now I really did know "Both Sides Now," but nothing like how I'd know it in later life. There I was again in my early 40s going through divorce and playing Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now album, released in 2000, and I wept at her latest rendition of her hit "Both Sides Now." No longer was it the the faster tempo tune that smacked of a folk-meets-pop-rock youth, the one on which I'd worn down the groove as a lovelorn teen. It had been reborn as middle-aged blues that shook me from the inside out, sung with the soul of the 57-year-old woman that Mitchell was in 2000.
It had been released in my birth month of the year I turned 40, but I don't think I found it until three years later (music laid low during much of my marriage), just in time to hear "the screen door slam and a big yellow taxi (take) away my old man," sort of, except I didn't miss him. I missed what I'd missed by trying to find bliss in a life with echoes of Mitchell's "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."
The thought that Joni Mitchell--painter, songwriter, singer, and defiant-yet-tender woman--might be one of my midlife muses, more a major muse than the minor one she'd been in my youth, had occurred to me before as I listened to her Both Sides Now CD/album and applied "A Case of You" to a male poet I knew personally who was another type of muse in my life in 2005/2006. However those thoughts were about a woman in love, facing disappointment, and growing in wisdom. That was nothing like the voice I heard with fresh midlife ears as I listened to "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody." She originally released the song in 1982 on her Wild Things Run Fast album when she was 39.
Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody
By Joni Mitchell
Caught in the middle
Carol, we're middle class
We're middle-aged
We were wild in the old days
Birth of rock
