Carey

This is a song made of salt air and wood smoke, built around an acoustic guitar figure that feels like it's been played on a beach somewhere in Crete with wine-stained fingers. The tempo has a loose, ambling quality — not quite a waltz, not quite a stomp, but somewhere in between that suggests dancing barefoot on an uneven floor. Mitchell's vocal here is one of her most physically alive performances: she projects a kind of uninhibited joy that sounds almost reckless, her voice climbing and dropping with the ease of someone who has temporarily forgotten to be careful. The song is about a specific kind of Mediterranean summer fling — transient, sensory, warmly impermanent — and the genius is that it never mourns its own ephemerality. The detail is tactile: the moons and Junes are left behind in favor of something grittier and more present-tense. It belongs to a lineage of songs that understand that the most honest love stories are not the permanent ones. Pull this out on a summer evening when you're somewhere unfamiliar and the air smells like something you can't name and you don't want the night to end.