"Paprika Plains" is a 16-minute song played on improvised piano and arranged with a full orchestra; it takes up all of Side 2.

In it, Mitchell narrates a first-person description of a late-night gathering in a bar frequented by Indigenous peoples of Canada, touching on themes of hopelessness and alcoholism.

And if you're writing free consciousness – which I do once in a while just to remind myself that I can, you know, because I'm fitting little pieces of this puzzle together – the end result must flow as if it was spoken for the first time.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter featured contributions from prominent jazz musicians, including four members of Weather Report – Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Manolo Badrena, and Alex Acuña.

The original album artwork depicted a photomontage of shots taken by Norman Seeff, later arranged by Mitchell with a camera lucida and set on an orange-and-blue colour backdrop selected by Glen Christensen.

[14] Rolling Stone opined that "the best that can be said for Don Juan's Reckless Daughter is that it is an instructive failure," writing that "it's sapped of emotion and full of ideas that should have remained whims, melodies that should have been riffs, songs that should have been fragments.