Big Yellow Taxi

Joni Mitchell wrote Big Yellow Taxi on her first trip to Hawaii. As she told the journalist Robert Hilburn in 1996, she took a taxi to her hotel, and the next morning she opened the curtains to see beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then she looked down and saw a parking lot stretching as far as the eye could see. It broke her heart, she said, a blight on paradise, and she sat down and wrote the song. The result packs a lot into little more than two minutes. One verse mocks a tree museum that charges admission, a jab aimed at Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu. Another asks a farmer to put away the DDT. In the last verse the political turns personal, as the taxi of the title carries her man away. It may have been a nod to Toronto's police patrol cars, which were painted yellow until 1986. Released in April 1970 and included on Ladies of the Canyon, it reached number 15 in Canada and number 11 in the UK but only 67 in the US, where a 1974 live version later did better. The song has kept travelling. Janet Jackson sampled it, Amy Grant covered it with lyrics changed at Mitchell's request, and Counting Crows took it into the charts again in 2002. Mitchell's website counts more than 600 recorded versions, and in 2005 CBC listeners voted it among the essential Canadian tracks. Its central image, paradise paved for parking, has become shorthand for a loss people recognise everywhere.