[1] But Mitchell has said that "The Circle Game" was written as a response to the song "Sugar Mountain" by Neil Young, whom she had befriended on the Canadian folk-music circuit in the mid-1960s.
"[2] In a concert at the Paris Theatre in London on October 29, 1970,[3] Mitchell opened her performance of "The Circle Game" with this speech: In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get back in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore.
Rush recorded the song as the title track of his 1968 album The Circle Game, which also featured the Mitchell compositions "Tin Angel" and "Urge for Going".
[7] When Buffy Sainte-Marie recorded "The Circle Game" in 1967 for her album Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, it was also released as a single (with "Until It's Time for You to Go" as the B-side) but did not chart.
[8] Sainte-Marie's version of "The Circle Game" is featured in Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in the scene where Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is driving on an L.A. freeway.
Mitchell's song has been covered by many other artists over the decades, including George Hamilton IV (1968), Harry Belafonte (1971), Agnes Chan (1971), Ian McCulloch (1989), Buffy Sainte-Marie (1996) and Tori Amos (2005).