Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I heard
Was a song outside my window
And the traffic wrote the words
It came ringing up like Christmas bells
And rapping up like pipes and drums
Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll wear it 'till the night comes
Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains
And a rainbow on the wall
Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you
Crimson crystal beads to beckon
Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
There's a sun show every second
Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passersby
And pigeons fly
And papers lie
Waiting to blow away
Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey
And a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch
And stuck to all my senses
Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll talk in present tenses
When the curtain closes
And the rainbow runs away
I will bring you incense
Owls by night
By candlelight
By jewel-light
If only you will stay
Pretty baby, won't you
Wake up, it's a Chelsea morning
© September 1, 1967; Gandalf Pub Co
Frank Zappa in front of the Garrick Theater, 152 Bleecker St., August 1967
This is my Chelsea Song. It's also full of morning and rainbows and much the same things because it was inspired it was inspired by the same set of stained glass windows only I moved them into a New York apartment. But it could be Chelsea in London. After I moved to New York, I spent a lot of time on a street called Bleecker Street, and on Bleecker Street is a theatre called the Garrick Theatre, and in the Garrick theatre are the Mothers of Invention. And, uh, they're coming over pretty soon. So this is Chelsea Morning, rainbow sunshine song influenced slightly by the Mothers of Invention.
Well, that’s one morning sunshine, love and rainbow song [ed note: she had just sung Come To The Sunshine] and I have another, and it was written much later, and in a different place. You see, a long time ago I purchased some stained-glass windows that were about to be demolished because they were wrecking the house for unwed mothers that they were in. The unwed mothers were without, of course. And, uh, I rescued them for $5 each and took them back to a very peaceful place and set them up in my windows and, every morning when the sun came up the rainbows came in. And, uh, then one day I moved to New York City, which is a very different place; very different circumstances for writing under ‘cause it’s noisy all the time. So I put my stained glass windows up and I covered up all of the sky, which was about that much of one corner above the church – a postage stamp piece of sky. And, uh, I wrote a very different morning rainbow, sunshine and love song, noisy as New York City.
(Audience member shouts for Chelsea Morning)
I, I don’t sing that song anymore… It’s like… you know Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience? It sorta belongs to my musical childhood, to me, you know? I’m not trying to be snobbish about my own songs (laughs).
That’s one thing that I always like about the painterly arts better than musical arts, is that like nobody would go up to Picasso and say: “hey, listen man, would ya paint a little of your blue period for us?” (laughs)
According to Karen O'Brien's Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light "the upbeat pop-ish "Chelsea Morning" [was] written during a visit to Philadelphia, after Mitchell and a group of women who were working in a club where she was performing had found chunks of brightly coloured glass discarded in an alleyway. They collected the glass and took it home to create mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. Mitchell took hers back to New York and hung it in the window of her small apartment in Chelsea; when the glass caught the sunlight, the colours shimmered around the walls." (p. 97)
As archived in Mojo Magazine's March 2019 issue: “I wrote that in Philadelphia after some girls who worked in this club where I was playing found all this coloured slag glass in an alley. We collected a lot of it and built these glass mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. I took mine back to New York and put them in my window on West 16th Street in the Chelsea District. The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colours all around the room. As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty. There’s even a reference to the mobile in the song. It was a very young and lovely time…before I had a record deal. I think it’s a very sweet song, but I don’t think of it as part of my best work. To me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingénue.”
Clouds
Released May 1969
Hits
Released October 29, 1996
The Studio Albums 1968-1979
Released November 2012
Archives - Volume One: The Early Years (1963-1967)
Released October 30, 2020
Archives - Volume Two: The Reprise Years (1968-1971)
Released October 29, 2021
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chum on :
The sun poured in like butterscotch...
exactly describes the feeling
WoodstockChild69 on :
I play this song every morning to wake up. This song is perfect, especially for sunny days! Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter, Chelsea, after this song.