Joni's at a party—"liquid soap and grass / and Jungle Gardenia [nb: a women's perfume] crash / On Pine-Sol and beer." All these markers of city degeneracy: sexual performance and drugs and chemicals for cleanup, and instead of balancing out it's adding up in dissonant notes. It's smoky and stifling, she says; she has to get out of there.
She goes outside, travels in her memory back to her hometown. It's raining and no one inside has even noticed. "Back in my hometown / They [the indigenous people] would have cleared the floor / Just to watch the rain come down! / They're such sky oriented people / Geared to changing weather." She's traveling back in time—back to her childhood, back to pre-colonial Canada—she's floating off, floating off in time.
And then she comes back mentally to the party as "the rain retreats."
"The band plugs in again / You see that mirrored ball begin to sputter lights and spin / Dizzy on the dancers / Geared to changing rhythms"
A parallel drawn between the indigenous way of life—geared to changing weathers—and the party itself, geared to changing rhythms. But Joni's somehow outside of it, inbetween, at home in neither. She is always "floating off." Not "geared" to a local environment and its local cadence and logic, but floating and untethered, living in a "dreamland" of her own making.
And I think given that Joni's entire career and life is one big investigation into freedom and its consequences, beginning with "Cactus Tree" (*And her heart is full and hollow / Like a cactus tree / While she's so busy being free") it's easy to read Paprika Plains as a continuation of the theme, freedom as homelessness, as peoplelessness. The only thing anchoring her in time and space is her unnamed love: "I'm floating back, floating back to you."
