By Elizabeth Searle

When you have your one and only baby, you bring Joni Mitchell with you. In the hospital’s birth room, Joni sings to you from your husband’s cassette player. At first, anyway. For the first stage of your 9-hour labor, the last stage of your before times, you sit in the birth room’s rocking chair and deep-breathe and rock away to Court and Spark. The album that you fell for hard while sitting lotus-style on your twin bed in your sister’s and your shared room.

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