Now old friends are acting strange,
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed,
Well something’s lost and something’s gained
in living every day.
But my heart is still broken is a new version of a Swimmer One song from 2007, somewhere between a cover and a sequel. It was prompted partly by the 20th anniversary of my old band’s first single, and partly by Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.
In 2022, as any Joni fan will know, the 79-year-old singer performed at the USA’s Newport Folk Festival, the first time she’d sung in public in nine years. She played over a dozen songs, but the one everyone seemed to be talking about afterwards was Both Sides Now. It’s one of those songs that increases in resonance the older you get, because it’s about the limitations of wisdom. A twentysomething singing “I really don’t know love at all” sounds like a straightforward response to their first few experiences of heartbreak and disappointment. When someone in their late seventies sings the same words it means something quite different – the humility to admit that some things are still beyond you, even after a long lifetime of learning. (Put another way, “I know that I know nothing.”). There’s also something especially poignant about someone so far from childhood fondly recalling a time when they thought of clouds as ‘ice cream castles in the air’.
Of course, one of the many impressive things about early Joni Mitchell was that she sounded so much older and wiser than her years. Her original, 1970 Both Sides Now is a perfect example. Another is Sisotowbell Lane, a beautiful, insightful song about the lives of old people sung by a 25-year-old on her debut album in 1968. But I still think her 2000 version of Both Sides Now, recorded in her late fifties, is a richer experience than the 1970 version, purely because of the extra life lived. If anything the 2022 one is even more powerful.
I’ve been listening to Both Sides Now a lot lately – all of Mitchell’s versions, plus the various covers, the first of which was released two years before Joni’s own first attempt – because I’m currently recording a new EP of songs co-written with people living with dementia. I discovered that one of the people I’m working with is a fan of Both Sides Now and loved singing it. I asked if he’d heard the Newport Folk Festival version and he hadn’t, so I played the footage to him on my phone and he was very moved. He could see that, much like him, Joni’s voice wasn’t what it used to be, and that, like him, she needed some prompting to remember the words, and had to sit down to sing when once she would have stood, but that the mental and physical effort required to get through it was part of what made it impactful. And so we ended up recording our own version of Both Sides Now, which should hopefully be out in the world quite soon. It is a beautiful thing and I’m very glad we did it.
If Both Sides Now means something different when sung by someone in old age, it means something different again when sung by someone with dementia. It’s especially true of the line, ‘now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I’ve changed’. I read recently that Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin related to that line because he thought it referred to musicians losing old friends when they became famous and successful. It could mean that, but it could also refer to friends’ bewildered response to someone’s mental health deteriorating. From the perspective of someone with dementia, it’s often everyone else who seems to be acting strange. But then that’s what makes Both Sides Now special; by accident or design, it means something different to almost everyone who hears it.
Anyway, all of this was on my mind when I decided to revisit three old Swimmer One songs for a new EP, Non Swimmers. All were originally released in 2007, and I was interested in how they would sound sung by someone 16 years older and, hopefully, a little wiser.
In the case of But My Heart is Still Broken, I changed most of the lyrics. I never much liked the original words; they didn’t come from a place of actual heartbreak, and were mostly just an experiment with seeing how certain phrases fitted together (the line ‘plastic matrix’ exists purely because I’d just been watching The Matrix). I think it shows. Even the big chorus line ‘my heart is broken’ sounds oddly unemotional to me, although I’ve been told that some people really love the song (sorry if I’m spoiling it for you).
By contrast, But My Heart is Still Broken emerged from recent loss – a friend who had died suddenly from a brain tumour, another who had recently died by suicide, even our old, beloved cat who had been with us since before the original song was written and is now buried in our back garden. On reflection, it was probably also a response to 2022 in general, an absolute fucker of a year for so many people in the UK, as we staggered out of Covid straight into a recession. I’ve described Non Swimmers as an EP for ‘everyone struggling to stay afloat’ and by that I’m mostly referring to its opening song.
It probably says a lot about my inability to write something simple, timeless and universal that I had to rewrite most of the words of an old song before I felt it was relevant to me, let alone anyone else. That’s one of the reasons why Joni Mitchell is Joni Mitchell and I am me, I suppose, but I hope this song ends up meaning something to someone.
My favourite bit of the new version had nothing to do with me. While mixing the song, Scott C Park emailed to say that he and Keith at Wee Studio had ‘taken some liberties that we couldn’t resist’, most obviously adding an electric guitar part that pushes the song into Godspeed You! Black Emperor territory, a direction I would never have thought to go.
music and words by Andrew Eaton Lewis 