49

A Case of You

music and words by Joni Mitchell

THIS IS A SONG RICH in meaning. Even the title is rich.

In the context of a love song, the usual sense of ‘case’ would be illness, ‘a case of you’ the amorous equivalent of a case of measles. The imagery is centuries old. From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the Romantics of the nineteenth century to the blues to Peggy Lee (‘You give me fever’), love has been portrayed as a malady – ‘a bad case of loving you’, to quote Moon Martin’s song.

But Joni Mitchell was never one for clichés, so having set up the expectation of this well-worn trope, she presents us, instead, with a different image, the more powerful for having first misled us: ‘I could drink a case of you,’ she sings at the end of the chorus, ‘and I would still be on my feet.’ So it’s a case of wine – ‘holy wine’, what’s more.

But what does she mean by this metaphor? That she can’t get enough of him? We know from the song’s first line that the affair is over. Perhaps she means the opposite, that in contrast to the singer of ‘You Go to My Head’, who tells us that ‘like a sip of sparkling Burgundy brew … you intoxicate my soul’, Joni can drink twelve whole bottles of this fellow, and be as sober as a judge. He might have intoxicated her in the past, but since their ‘love got lost’ he has no effect on her at all. Is that what she means?

‘A Case of You’ is a song from Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, which, on its release in 1971, brought her the greatest success of her career to date. The songs were among her finest, the singing perhaps the best she ever achieved, and her instrumental accompaniments, moving from guitar to piano to dulcimer and making a feature of each, were bold and varied.

‘Just before our love got lost, you said: / “I am as constant as a northern star.” / And I said: “Constantly in the darkness – where’s that at? / If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.”’ You can read those opening lines as prose. There is no sense of metre and the only hint that it might be the start of a song lyric is the rhyming of ‘star’ with ‘bar’. It is, then, a perfectly typical Mitchell lyric, the words tumbling over themselves to fit her expandable melodic lines. No one else wrote songs that do quite this. Mitchell’s great contemporaries, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, though wordsmiths first, were not above faking a rhyme and truncating or obscuring sense to make their words fit their tunes. Mitchell, a far more sophisticated and inventive musician than either man, wrote melodies and chord structures that seemed infinitely elastic, allowing her to say exactly what she wanted.

There’s a theory that Cohen is the ‘you’ of this song; there’s another theory that it’s Graham Nash. Cohen is perhaps more likely on the basis of the quotation from Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, the doomed emperor tells his circling assassins, ‘I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament’. Moments later, he is dead.

Are we meant to conclude that Joni’s ex-lover is pretentious? Possibly, and in this opening exchange she certainly gives herself the last word (‘If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.’). But in the second verse, by which point the insufferable fellow is paraphrasing Rilke (‘Love is touching souls’), she is more acquiescent (‘Surely you touched mine’.) So what are we to think? Is her sobriety real or does he still go to her head, pretensions and all? She wouldn’t be the first drunk to insist she was stone cold sober. Is she over him or not? To discover the song’s meaning, we must hear not only the words, but also the music.

The Appalachian dulcimer is the principal instrument here, strummed in a staccato manner that underlines the distinctive rhythm of a song that seems to want to be a tango, especially at the line: ‘I – could drink – a case of you’. The other instruments are James Taylor’s guitar and Russell Kunkel’s congas, absent from the song until the final line of the first verse and the words ‘O Canada’. This is a significant moment in the song. Mitchell, a Canadian, was, by the time of Blue, a resident of California – there’s a song on the album entitled ‘California’ – and so when she finds herself in the darkened bar drawing ‘a map of Canada … with your face sketched on it twice’ it is doubly nostalgic. ‘O Canada’ is the title of the Canadian national anthem, its significance highlighted by the arrival of the other instruments, and the song’s first high note as the last syllable of ‘Canada’ takes her sailing up the octave. (Of course Cohen, too, was Canadian.)

This is both a nostalgic song and a song about nostalgia. Mitchell is a character in the song, but also a detached observer. The action of the verses is in the past tense, the chorus in the present. The bar with ‘the blue TV screen light’, the ‘cartoon coaster’ with the sketched map, ‘that time’ he told her about ‘touching souls’, the woman she met with the mouth like his: these things have all passed, like their lost love, and yet, in the chorus he is there in her blood ‘like holy wine’.

The song is in the key of D flat (the octave leap on ‘Canada’ is from D flat to D flat), and the verses of the song are contained within that octave with just the odd dip down to the dominant A flat or the leading note C, to reinforce the D flat-ness of it all. But the chorus floats up out of the octave to E flat: ‘You are in my blood like holy wine.’ (And it’s worth remembering that holy wine – communion wine – is meant to be ‘the blood of Christ’.)

The song’s three choruses aren’t exactly the same musically or verbally (for example, in the second and third choruses, the word order changes to ‘Still I’d be on my feet’), but ‘blood’ is always on that high E flat, and in a song where the word-setting is preponderantly syllabic, the ‘you’ in ‘I could drink a case of you’ always comes with a melisma. The first time it is relatively restrained, but as the song continues the melisma soars up to an F, the song’s highest note. This is in contrast to the clipped – one might say sober – manner in which she sings ‘I could drink a case’.

There can’t be much doubt about Mitchell’s true feelings. The mostly syllabic singing in the past-tense verses may be from her head, but the present-tense choruses, with their ever-expanding melismas, are from her heart.