Schooner Music
There's a man who's been out sailing
In a decade full of dreams
And he takes her to a schooner
And he treats her like a queen
Bearing beads from California
With their amber stones and green
He has called her from the harbor
He has kissed her with his freedom
He has heard her off to starboard
In the breaking and the breathing
Of the water weeds
While she was busy being free
59-ft Alden schooner MAYAN.
A recent (and very good) rendition of the 1968 Joni Mitchell song “Cactus Tree” has been on high rotation in my Spotify playlist this month. Hailey Tuck’s version is faithful to the original, but brings a 21st century sensibility and edginess, contrasting with the arrangement of Mitchell’s original which now, in retrospect, can sound a little trite.
"Cactus Tree" is the final song on Joni Mitchell's debut album, Song To A Seagull. It's about several men who are in love with a woman, with each story tied together by the common theme of the unnamed woman's need for freedom and resistance to romantic commitment. In every case, the woman "thinks she loves them all" but ultimately is always "too busy being free."
The song is written in the third person, but Mitchell is an autobiographical songwriter and the female subject in the song is herself. The feeling is that Mitchell is torn over her simultaneous need for love and her need for freedom, with freedom always ultimately winning out. Every verse tells the story of a lover, or an overview of several lovers, identified with archetypal personas like "a jouster and a jester and a man who owns a store."
Mitchell has called herself a "serial monogamist." She carried the inner tension presented in this song throughout her life. She has long resisted naming any of the people in this or any of her songs, saying it's best to keep them anonymous because people are free to imagine themselves as the characters in the songs when they don't know what she had in mind.
In September 2019, David Crosby of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash fame said he was the man in the first verse. He died early last year but he had long been the prime suspect. The pair had a working relationship as well as a romantic one, with Crosby producing Song to a Seagull
This makes the Schooner in the third line the 59-ft Alden MAYAN.
In the months just before and after 1969, as clean-cut crooners and girl bands and Motown acts gave way to long-haired singer-songwriters who filled football stadiums, the Great American Songbook tilted on a fulcrum. At the center was a mustachioed scamp with sparkling blue eyes – and a wooden ship designed 40 years earlier by the great John G. Alden.
Read on HERE
