David Crosby knew what he had found within minutes of stumbling into a Joni Mitchell show at the Gaslight Cafe in autumn 1967. The disaffected Byrd had come to Florida in search of a new start, but found a different kind of break from the norm. "I went looking for a sailboat to live on- I wanted to do something else, find another way to be. I was pretty disillusioned," he recalled years later. "I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove, and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked. I fell for her immediately. It's a little like falling into a cement mixer. She's kind of a turbulent girl."

Song To a Seagull is a quietly audacious debut. The least user-friendly of all of her early records, its spartan production job was true to Mitchell and Crosby's determination to get these songs down in their purest form, without psychedelic curlicues or mom-and-pop-friendly string sections.

"If I'd recorded a year ago, l would have used lots of orchestration," she told Rolling Stone in May 1968, alluding to how the success of her songs had enabled her to call the shots. "No one would have let me put out an acoustic album. They would have said it's like having a whole paintbox and using only brown."