Joni Mitchell has composed songs about numerous people, environmental challenges, and the heart. Her songs ‘Break Up’ and ‘Rainy Night House’ honor David Crosby and Leonard Cohen, respectively.
Some of her subjects were less famous. She wrote “Speechless” for her 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast, maybe in reference to her inability to speak. Mitchell found the story of forgotten German cinematographer Max Fassbender in 1989 and was motivated to finish the song she had started seven years earlier.
Fassbender, born in Berlin on October 8, 1868, appeared in several silent films. Richard Oswald’s literary adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1917) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1919) and his early vampire film Nächte des Grauens were among his works. Fassbender also worked on Arzén von Cserépy’s Colomba (1918), Hermann Rosenfeld’s The Medium (1921), and Emil Harder’s William Tell (1924).
Fassbender was heartbroken by a male lover as a young gay man in Germany under Paragraph 175, a law passed in May 1871 that criminalized sexual meetings between men. He and many other Germans were denied a life with their partners until 1994.
Mitchell added lyrics to ‘Speechless’ to create ‘Two Grey Rooms’ for her 1991 album Night Ride Home, inspired by Fassbender’s anguish. The song is an aching, melancholy, and sweet ballad about seeing love from afar, alone in a house with two dreary rooms, and feeling like you’ve disappeared.
The melody’s soft caress and Mitchell’s bittersweet ache—part guilt and regret, part acceptance, and part longing—explain why she kept the music for so long. It’s also evident why she wanted the proper lyrics for the sparse, lonely, and yearning instrumentation.
The song is “a story of obsession; about this German aristocrat who had a lover in his youth that he never got over,” Mitchell told the Los Angeles Times in 1996.
She said: “He later finds this man working on a dock and notices his daily commute. The nobleman leaves up his nice digs and moves to these two modest grey apartments overlooking the street to watch this man walk to and from work. The song reveals that my songs aren’t all self-portraits.