Joni Mitchell's friend Don Freed has looked at life from both sides now - and he's chosen his songwriting work with kids and his Saskatoon apartment over Mitchell's mansion

SASKATOON -- Singer and songwriter Don Freed is a study in contrasts, like the dappling of sunlight and shadow on a forest floor. He's been in the spotlight, and shared it with such performers as Johnny Cash, but he also likes his low-key life in Saskatoon.

He's been Joni Mitchell's consort for seven years, but they mostly live separately. "It's easy," he says, of making a relationship work when she's in a Bel Air mansion and he's in a little apartment in a Prairie city. "Neither of us cohabits well. We're always working on something and we both need a lot of solitude."

He adds, too, that Mitchell casts "kind of a big shadow to be in. She's a big celebrity. We can be in the most obscure places for a holiday and it turns into a walking autograph party." He's adamant about not being "thought of in terms of somebody else. In order to do what I do, I've got to retain a sense of self."

The project that's kept him rooted in Saskatchewan for the past eight years is a songwriting venture with children in isolated communities. This month, he's visiting schools in the northern towns of Creighton and Wollaston Lake, adding more songs to his collection of several hundred. In the coming months, he hopes to record 40 of these songs with the youngsters who helped create them, then to release the work on his own Bushleague Records label next year.

When he gets together with Mitchell, "it's kind of interesting," Freed says. "I might be dining with the King of Sweden and staying in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a couple of days later I'll be sleeping on the floor in some reserve, eating native M and Ms" -- his slang term for moose meat and muskeg tea.

He allows he's become "more worldly" as a result of his relationship with Mitchell. He points to a photo of her with Bob Dylan, whose songs he sang along with his own when, as a skinny teenager, he began performing at coffeehouses in 1965. "I took that picture, in Japan," he says.

Mitchell's mother, who lives in Saskatoon, introduced her to Freed in 1993. "We'd both gone through a period of no relationships in our lives," he notes. "I was getting older and I was worrying that I was so solitary and wondering what kind of a relationship I could possibly have. It turned out she was thinking along the same lines."

Shortly after they met, he moved to Los Angeles to be with her "and basically sat around a pool for six months." He discovered "I can't do that."

Now they visit back and forth, but he's based in a tiny, third-floor apartment on Saskatoon's west side, not far from the neighbourhood in which he grew up in the fifties and sixties.

He lives simply. He has no car, and for years, he didn't even have a television but, he admits with a smile, "Those winters can get awfully long. I mostly watch nature shows, though." It's not that he doesn't enjoy the limelight, says Freed, as he sips iced tea and plays with an unlit cigarette. But he wants the real thing, not a reflected glow. He's finally finding a sense of real achievement now in his multifaceted project with school children.

"I've never been superfocused on anything until this," he says. His childhood heroes were inventors and he claimed he'd become "either a scientist or a hobo" when he grew up. As a troubadour, he's been closer to the latter. "I've just meandered and written songs. Maybe it's my Métis blood, just following the river, because all my relatives were voyageurs and traders."

At 51, Freed, who admits he was a "horrible" student ("If I was in school now, I'd be taking Ritalin"), has finally found his niche in the classroom, with animated students surrounding him and his guitar. But he's particular about not being known as a children's performer. On his business card, Freed describes himself as a "creative facilitator/performer."

In collaboration with kids in isolated communities throughout Saskatchewan -- where many share his Métis heritage -- he's created hundreds of songs touching on their experiences and interests. The verses, some poignant and others rollicking, are filled with ravens and sasquatches, bears and bannock. A much-requested song, wherever he goes, is Me and My Skunk, from Pinehouse Lake. At school assemblies at Turnor Lake, the students sing their song, about catching suckers at the bridge. Freed is now doing his last songwriting workshops in northern schools, sponsored by Saskatchewan Education and the Ile-à-la-Crosse school division. Ultimately, the songs and accompanying material in Cree, Dene and Michif (a patois of Cree and French) will be part of the provincial school curriculum.

Freed has hired a professional fundraiser to secure the $125,000 necessary to produce a double album, Our Very Own Songs. If all goes well, he'll release it and an accompanying songbook and a CD-ROM next fall. There are also plans for a Web site, connecting these youngsters with children around the world.

Sure, he agrees, he could ask Mitchell to bankroll this ambitious project. "But I wouldn't want to do that," he says firmly.

It's the time in Saskatoon's Cosmic Pad recording studio with engineer Ross Nykiforuk, that will be expensive. "Bed tracks" of the songs, containing only the instrumentals, will be sent to the schools so that the youngsters who wrote each song (or their younger siblings) will be able to rehearse. Later, Freed and Nykiforuk will record the vocals with the children before taking them back to the studio for mixing.

While it has afforded him only a "meagre" living over the past eight years, this work is a calling to Freed. It represents a fusion of impulses and incidents he initially couldn't understand.

Some of the early breaks in Freed's career came through his serendipitous association with Johnny Cash. When he attended a Cash concert in Calgary in 1968, he was picked as a quintessential fan by a crew making a documentary about Cash and ended up being taken to Nashville for more scenes. Not long afterwards, Cash invited Freed, the hometown boy, up on stage at a Saskatoon concert to sing a couple of songs. Ironically, the documentary was panned when it came out a year later, but Freed got a favourable mention in the New York Times. This led to a personal management and recording contract for the young musician in New York City.

Strangely, though, all the while he was a fledgling songwriter in New York in the early 1970s, he felt compelled to work in northern Saskatchewan -- a part of the province he'd never visited.

Instead, he returned to Saskatoon and embarked on a career singing in bars and producing his own recordings. His first, in 1981, was Off in All Directions, a reference to his diverse musical interests, that embraced, then as now, country, folk and pop genres.

He had a revelation in 1989, discovering his Métis ancestry at the funeral of his great-aunt in Duck Lake, Sask. He had thought he was French and Swedish, but now he learned, for example, that Gabriel Dumont was a great-great uncle.

He was still avidly researching his roots when another northern community, Labrador's Davis Inlet, dominated headlines in 1992, following the tragic suicides of despondent young Innu. "And every cell in my body said to do something, to create a positive story."

In the early seventies, he'd visited a friend at a fly-in reserve in the north. "I noticed how great the kids were, walking around with their arms around each other in little clusters. They weren't whiny, bratty, mean-spirited kids."

With the arrival of television, they began comparing their lives to the glamorous worlds they saw on the screen, he says, "and their self-esteem just plummeted. I knew there was a lot of positive energy up there and I wanted to go up there and get it."

With the blessings of the Saskatchewan education ministry and the Northern Lights School Division, Freed arrived in Jans Bay, population 100, in 1992. He'd never performed for children and had no children's repertoire. However, he says, "If the heart is in a sincere place, it finds a way."

He began by singing Old Macdonald Had a Farm, and it went on for 45 minutes "because they wanted every animal in creation in there . . . a raven, a bear, a moose. They wanted their own world reflected in the song, and that told me a great deal."

Freed himself secretly started writing stories at age 7 and songs a few years later. He'd write one line on top of another, a code to ensure nobody else could read it.

"I'd stay up all night and hum under my pillow, and go to school every day sleep-deprived." He savours the irony in "taking the same energy that made me a bad student back into the classroom and doing this project.

"If someone had come into my classroom when I was in Grade 2 and said 'We're gonna write a song,' I wouldn't have had to write one line over the other."