‘River,’ the ‘thoroughly depressing’ Joni Mitchell song that somehow became a Christmas classic
The antidote to cheery holiday songs
Plenty of artists have been dreaming of a very, very blue Christmas over the last two decades: “River” — originally featured on Mitchell’s melancholy 1971 masterwork, “Blue” — has become a seasonal favorite, despite being “thoroughly depressing,” as Elbow frontman Guy Garvey noted at a 2009 Christmas concert.
Or perhaps it’s ascended to holiday-hit status precisely because it’s an antidote to all those “songs of joy and peace.”
“We needed a sad Christmas song, didn’t we?” Mitchell said with a chuckle on NPR in 2014. “In the ‘bah humbug’ of it all.”
“River” has long been a popular cover among musicians, more than 500 of whom have recorded it for commercial release. Countless others have performed it in concert.
“We kind of turned it into a Christmas song, even though it was not written as a Christmas song,” White, who started the “River”-as-holiday-song trend nearly two decades ago, said at a holiday concert in 2011.
Christmas collections it’s included in
- British jazz-fusion guitarist Peter White featured it on his 1997 album, “Songs of the Season”
- Barry Manilow’s “A Christmas Gift of Love”
- Linda Ronstadt’s “A Merry Little Christmas”
- Tracey Thorn’s “Tinsel and Lights”
- Heart’s “Home for Christmas”
- Sarah McLachlan’s Grammy-nominated “Wintersong”
- Idina Menzel’s “Holiday Wishes” album in 2014
- 98 Degrees’s new album, “Let It Snow”
- Sam Smith, the best-selling British singer-songwriter, recently covered “River” for Spotify’s Christmas playlist and gushed: “Joni Mitchell is one of the reasons why I write music. … It was a dream to be given the opportunity to cover this song.”
- Keane frontman Tom Chaplin’s new album, “Twelve Tales of Christmas” has a moody version of “River”
About the song
Linda Ronstadt said “River” was an obvious choice when she recorded her own holiday album, “A Merry Little Christmas,” in 2000.
Ronstadt said at the time that she’d never discussed the meaning of the song with her old friend, Mitchell.
But she had some ideas about what might have inspired it — possibly including Mitchell’s daughter, who was born in the 1960s, when the singer was 21 and about to move from Saskatoon to Toronto.
Mitchell gave the child up for adoption and didn’t have any contact with her until 1997.
“I think that’s what a lot of her singing is about, because it has this very sad tinge,” Ronstadt speculated. “But who really knows if that’s what ‘River’ is about? The answer is: I don’t know, and I bet Joni doesn’t, either.”
James Taylor
James Taylor, who knows the song better than just about anybody aside from Mitchell, said in a 2006 interview with The Post that “I don’t know why it’s suddenly getting picked up as a Christmas song. But some things just become identified as seasonal songs, and this is now one of them.”
At the time, Taylor had just released “James Taylor at Christmas,” which included “River” — a song he’d first heard decades earlier, when Mitchell played it at her home in Los Angeles in 1970, shortly after it was written.
“Most Christmas songs are light and shallow, but ‘River’ is a sad song,” Taylor told The Post. “It starts with a description of a commercially produced version of Christmas in Los Angeles . . . then juxtaposes it with this frozen river, which says, ‘Christmas here is bringing me down.’ It only mentions Christmas in the first verse. Then it’s, ‘Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on’ — wanting to fall into this landscape that she remembers.
“It’s such a beautiful thing, to turn away from the commercial mayhem that Christmas becomes and just breathe in some pine needles. It’s a really blue song.”
Taylor said the song is most likely autobiographical, given that “it starts with a girl from Canada watching them try to make Christmas on La Brea in Los Angeles.”
But he told The Post in 2006 that he’d never actually discussed the meaning with Mitchell, with whom he was romantically involved in the early 1970s.
“Do I want to know who she made cry, who she made say goodbye? Well, I haven’t asked her that question,” Taylor said. “That’s the only mystery in it: Who was it whose heart she broke?”
With a laugh, he added: “There were a lot of us.”
