Two Grey Rooms

"Two Grey Rooms" is an original ballad written and performed by Canadian musician Joni Mitchell. The song concludes her 1991 album Night Ride Home and was its final single as well as Mitchell’s final single for Geffen Records.

Mitchell wrote a wordless vocal melody and instrumental accompaniment for the song in 1982 during her Wild Things Run Fast sessions. She titled it "Speechless." Lyrical inspiration escaped the songwriter until 1989, when she encountered the story of New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who, amid the repression of Germany’s antigay Paragraph 175 laws, was left broken-hearted by a male lover in his youth.

In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell says of the song:

It's a story of obsession ... about this German aristocrat who had a lover in his youth that he never got over. He later finds this man working on a dock and notices the path that the man takes every day to and from work. So the aristocrat gives up his fancy digs and moves to these two shabby gray rooms overlooking this street, just to watch this man walk to and from work. That's a song that shows my songs aren't all self-portraits.^[1]

Video

A video for "Two Grey Rooms" was shot with Mitchell as the song’s protagonist. With her as the lone actor, and a barren flat overlooking a blighted landscape as the sole setting, the sepia-and-white clip – perhaps an homage to Fassbinder’s occasional style – portrays the crippling ennui of the song’s setting. Lauded by fans, the work remains rarely seen, having been programmed to an elusive adult contemporary audience with only modest rotation. Fan-created video accompaniments to the song routinely appear on youtube.com, but a posting of the official video on that site has been interrupted as of August 2007.

Covers and Versions

• Chaka Khan selected Joni's recording of "Two Grey Rooms" for the 2005 tribute album Joni Mitchell: Songs Chosen By Her Friends and Fellow Musicians on Starbucks’ Hear Music label.
• "Speechless," the wordless vocal and instrumental bed for "Two Grey Rooms," was released as “Two Grey Rooms (Demo Version)” on 2003’s Joni Mitchell: The Complete Geffen Recordings (disc 1, track 12).
• Canadian pop-jazz singer Lori Cullen covered the song on her 2006 album Calling for Rain.
• Tom Wopat covered the song on his 2009 album Consider It Swung.
• Carol Grimes covered the song on her 2003 album Mother.

References

External links

• Lyrics
• Joni Mitchell
• Full lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics