See Kelly Clarkson Cover Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ With Only a Dulcimer Accompanying Her
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Kelly Clarkson reached deep within herself for a moving rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” on today’s edition of the “Kellyoke” segment of her Kelly Clarkson Show. Jaco Caraco accompanied her on the Appalachian dulcimer as her voice rose and dropped around Mitchell’s lyrics about being “as constant as a Northern Star” and the song’s famous refrain, “I could drink a case of you, ooh darling/Still, I’d be on my feet.”
The solitude of the performance only heightens the emotion she poured into singing the song. The only drawback to the clip was that it was only two minutes, about half the length of Mitchell’s recording of the song on Blue.
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In 1979, Mitchell described Blue as an “honest” album. “There’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” she told Rolling Stone. “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”
Mitchell took the Northern Star line from something Leonard Cohen once told her, likening himself to being as steady as Polaris. Cohen described her in the Mitchell biography Reckless Daughter: “She was like a storm.”
When Rolling Stone ranked the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2021, “A Case of You” came in at Number 26. “She later dismissed ‘A Case of You’ as ‘a doormat song,’ yet it remains one of her most beloved,” the magazine said.
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