Cactus Tree

"Cactus Tree" is the final song on Joni Mitchell's debut album, Song To A Seagull. It's about several men who are in love with a woman, with each story tied together by the common theme of the unnamed woman's need for freedom and resistance to romantic commitment. In every case, the woman "thinks she loves them all" but ultimately is always "too busy being free." The song is written in the third person, but Mitchell is an autobiographical songwriter and the female subject in the song is herself. The feeling is that Mitchell is torn over her simultaneous need for love and her need for freedom, with freedom always ultimately winning out. Every verse tells the story of a lover, or an overview of several lovers, identified with archetypal personas like "a jouster and a jester and a man who owns a store." Mitchell has called herself a "serial monogamist." She carried the inner tension presented in this song throughout her life.

Mitchell has long resisted naming any of the people in this or any of her songs, saying it's best to keep them anonymous because people are free to imagine themselves as the characters in the songs when they don't know what she had in mind. On September 29, 2019, David Crosby said he was the man in the first verse. He had long been the prime suspect. There's a man who's been out sailing In a decade full of dreams And he takes her to a schooner And he treats her like a queen Bearing beads from California With their amber stones and green He has called her from the harbor He has kissed her with his freedom He has heard her off to starboard In the breaking and the breathing Of the water weeds While she was busy being free There's an interesting connection in this revelation to the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Déjà vu." Crosby said that inspiration for that sung struck him while sailing. Also, the Crosby, Stills, & Nash song "Wooden Ships was written by Crosby while on his boat.

Mitchell wrote this shortly after seeing the Bob Dylan concert film Don't Look Back. When she first performed the song in 1967, she said that she hadn't been influenced by Dylan to that point, but was after watching the movie.