Songs Like Both Sides, Now by Joni Mitchell
By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-09-05
Written when Joni Mitchell was in her early twenties, Both Sides, Now reads gentler than almost anything else that carries this much weight: intensity 27, dynamic range 6, 82 BPM, smooth, softly sung, with no sudden changes anywhere. We tag it contemplative, melancholy and nostalgic.
Its measured neighbours
- Fast Car — Tracy Chapman. Intensity 24, dynamic range 6, 90 BPM.
- Mystery of Love — Sufjan Stevens. Intensity 24, dynamic range 6, 80 BPM — near-identical shape, two BPM from the seed.
- The Trapeze Swinger — Iron & Wine. Intensity 28, dynamic range 5, 78 BPM. Shares the rare nostalgic tag.
- Cranes in the Sky — Solange. Intensity 28, dynamic range 5, 80 BPM.
- The Thrill Is Gone — B.B. King. Intensity 28, dynamic range 7, 90 BPM — the widest swing here.
- It’s Too Late — Carole King. Intensity 24, dynamic range 5, 126 BPM.
The one that will surprise you
Every Breath You Take by The Police measures intensity 27 with a dynamic range of 6 — identical to Both Sides, Now on both, and it shares the contemplative and melancholy tags. Two songs read as equally gentle by our instruments; one of them, by its writer’s own account, is about surveillance. We wrote about that gap in our guide to it.
Both Sides, Now appears on Joni Mitchell’s 1969 album Clouds. Figures are our own measurements, read from the public API at build time. The genre and era spread is a consequence of measuring sound rather than style — it is not a claim that these artists resemble each other in any other way. No lyrics are reproduced.