Musician Abhors Getting Parking in Eden
I was first inspired to write Paradise Lost while listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs, for which Both Sides Now was one of the selected eight records. Looking back at the archive helpfully posted online by Praful Kapadia, I’ve decided it was the episode featuring The Wire actor Wendell Pierce, although I now learn Joni Mitchell is the 76th most commonly picked artist on the show; her records would accompany 47 guests to their desert island, nine of whom selected Both Sides Now. (That compares to 121 for Bob Dylan, and 1028 for Mozart).
Anyway, I hadn’t heard the song for decades; more or less, I think, since I learned it at primary school, and hearing again its lyrics again after all that time — candid, cynical, wise — left me rather emotional.
I was delighted, and somewhat surprised, to discover that, alongside the accolade of being selected so frequently for the desert island, she is also a awarded several slots in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which I felt made her a more than suitable candidate for inclusion in a crossword.
My first attempt was to include a selection of the expressions used in the lyrics of Both Sides Now, inserted forwards or backwards depending on the positive or negative sentiments afforded to them. This proved too ambitious: a grid stuffed with MOONS and JUNES and FEATHER CANYONS alongside WONS DNA NIAR and NUS EHT KCOLB just didn’t work.
I turned to her other entries in the ODQ: one of which, Woodstock, pleasingly concatenates two words each with multiple synonyms, and which also would, I imagined, give solvers (even those who never heard of Joni) a decent hint to look for a folk musician. The third work cited, Big Yellow Taxi, instructs listeners to put up A PARKING LOT, a string which, boasting thirteen letters, makes a pleasing central pillar for the grid.
All that remained was to find a decent number of types of cloud (STORM, OORT, FOG, BANNER) or synonyms for it (DEFAME, DULL), and the grid was basically done. Just another show, as a wise woman once said.
Deuce