It’s clear from the lyrics that he’s not happy and the relationship went wrong somehow. My SO says it’s clearly suicide but I’m not so sure.
Link: - YouTube
Well, if you google ‘Michael Nesmith Joanne Meaning’, you find a lot of speculation, but nothing definitive. He joked once that it was about a cow, and the song was dedicated to Jack Nicholson and his then girlfriend Mimi.
I love the song, but suicide never crossed my mind. I always assumed it was just another love affair that didn’t quite work out.
Regardless of meaning, a wonderfully heartfelt song - thanks, Mike.
If we’re attempting an interpretation, I think it’s important to note that he later revised the lyrics.
The most current version of the lyrics from 1981 (unless he’s revised them again since then):
There may be some clues to be found there.
Creations like this can be lots of things. Sometimes, lots of things at the same time, and not really any of them, both at once.
If you actually do enough creative writing yourself, and you have the right attitude about it, you can discover that often, what starts as one thought, evolves as the author writes, and comes to be about something else. Sometimes what starts as a joke, turns serious.
Sometimes there are layers to a writing that the author themselves don’t recognize as they write. Like psychotherapy.
Sometimes only the audience sees the truths of the work, and sometimes there is no truth, just bits of nice sounding ideas, strung together to set a mood, or even to make a sale of a song.
I know a song by Sting, that’s very serious, and very insightful. But any artist can get tired of their own work, and rebel against it, and I’ve heard Sting sing nonsense words as a joke, to that same serious and excellent work. The joke later, doesn’t mean that the meaning of the song was now revealed to have been absurdity all along.
Or maybe it does.
I’ve been listening to the song . . . beautiful.
I don’t know what it means, but it touches my soul.
For some reason, I always conflated this song with Aubrey by Bread (“And Aubrey was her name…”), which I in turn confused with Diary by Bread (“I found her diary underneath a tree…”) so in my mind all of three of these songs occurred in a universe where girls left their diaries laying around and sensitive singer-songwriter types found them and leapt to various conclusions. YMMV.
I don’t know if Nesmith had a definite plotline in mind, and I’m not sure he himself could tell you exactly what happened between Joanne and the song’s narrator.
My GUESS is that the narrator fell madly in love with Joanne. She had a powerful hold on him, but he came to realize that she didn’t love him nearly as much as he loved her. They had some happy times, but the relationship ended long ago.
And now? He remembers and treasures what they had, and no longer feels any sadness or regret over how it ended.
I agree with your assessment of the song lyrics. A song similar I believe is the one by Frank Ifield called “ I Remember You. “When the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all I will say “I remember you” If you watch the video where Mike sings the song in concert please read all the comments people posted about what the song meant to them, I think they were written just after he died, & I believe at a relatively young age. There are quite a few videos about Joanne, even how to play the song on guitar & different covers of the song. An amazing song that has the ability to bring many to tears when they hear it