FEATURE:
Refuge of the Roads
Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at Fifty
_________
I just twigged…
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell captured listening while backstage at the Civic Center in Providence, RI in February, 1976. This image was taken during her North American Tour that year and was chosen for the front cover of her Woman of Heart and Mind DVD/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein
that the Deacon Blue song, Fergus Sings the Blues, must have taken its name from Joni Mitchell’s track, Furry Sings the Blue. That track appears on Hejira. Many consider this to be her greatest album. Mitchell turns eighty-three on 7th November. You can see Hejira as the beginning of a more experimental/Jazz-influenced period that would lead to 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and 1979’s Mingus. I especially love Hejira’s cover. I will come to some features and reviews of Hejira. As it turns fifty on 21st November, I wanted to mark that. Many people do not put it up there with her best work. Many look at 1971’s Blue or 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon as being her prime releases. I think that Hejira is one of her very best. Linking to the Joni Mitchell website and information about Hejira, we get a beautiful article from Laura Snapes that provides this background to the album. The changes that were happening in Mitchell’s life and career:
“The women of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns were always trapped in somebody else's frame. Joni Mitchell only used the first person once on her seventh album; instead, she sang of women as seen through men's eyes, assessed according to their suitability for motherhood, sex and deference. Similarly, Mitchell found herself made into an adjunct when she briefly joined the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, opening for male artists who were her equal. She approached the tour as a research trip, "an amazing experience, studying mysticism and ego malformation like you wouldn't believe", as she told journalist Timothy White. "Everybody took all of their vices to the Nth degree and came out of it born again, or into AA."
Where these acts were tilting towards the mainstream, by the mid-‘70s, Mitchell was keenly following Marvin Gaye in "moving away from the hit department, to the art department", keen to forge her own rhythms away from rock. In the wake of her split from drummer John Guerin, she was ready to give life the slip for a while.
After the end of the Hissing tour, Mitchell was sojourning at Neil Young's beach house. She she wanted to travel, but didn't know where, or who with. By chance, two friends invited her to drive cross-country. Her answer: '"I've been waiting for you; I'm gone,"' she recounted to Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe. They travelled together for a while before Mitchell went off alone. It was one of three road trips she took between 1975 and 1976, which led her from Los Angeles to Maine, then California via Florida and the Gulf Of Mexico. On the road, Mitchell stayed in lighthouses along the Gulf Coast and wore wigs to disguise herself in New Orleans. "Meanwhile, nobody knew where I was," she told White. "I'd do those disappearing acts. I'd pass through some seedy town with a pinball arcade, fall in with people who worked on the machines, people staying alive shoplifting, whatever. They don’t know who you are: 'Why you driving hat white Mercedes? Oh, you're driving it across country for somebodyelse.' You know, make up some name and hang out. Great experiences, almost like the prince and the pauper."
Mitchell had no license for her flashy car, so she drove behind truckers, who would signal when the police were approaching. She was living out of bounds, but hadn't, as the folk song goes “fallen by the wayside”. By the mid-‘70s, Walden and On The Road were archetypal male quests, but there were still few cultural precedents for women travelling alone. Eighteenth-century "girl stunt reporter" Nellie Bly circled the world in 72 days to prove that she could. Simone De Beauvoir’s America Day By Day (1947) was more journalistic, intended to convey the reality of America's culture and mores to the French. Released in 1976, the same year as Mitchell's travels, Tom Robbins' absurdist novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues followed the giant-thumbed Sissy Hankshaw as she encountered various countercultural avatars, But although just as geographically far-reaching, Mitchell's trip was defiantly insular- the kind of story that hadn't yet been written.
Living between her car and anonymous motels, Mitchell wrote songs on her acoustic guitar since pianos were seldom available. She thought of naming the collection of material "Travelling", but that implied a fixed destination. Instead, she chose a reference to the migration of the prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which she later summed up as "leaving the dream, no blame".
"'Hejira' was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted," she told Crowe. "Running away, honourably." She continued, referencing her split with Guerin. "It dealt with the leaving of a relationship, but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessarily anybody's fault. It was a new attitude."
A new attitude required a new musical approach, furthering Mitchell's quicksilver mid-‘70s evolution. "For a long time, I've been playing in straight rhythms," she had told friend Malka Marom in 1973. "But now, in order to sophisticate my music to my own taste, I push it into odd places that feel a little unusual to me, so that I feel I'm stretching out." After 1974's richly melodic Court And Spark, the jazzy abstractions of Hissing were perceived as an ornery career-killer. On Hejira, Mitchell pared percussion back to the faintest patter, ditched choruses, and created nine fairly similar tone poems from her guitar (mostly electric on the recordings) and Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass. (Only lounge-jazz pastiche "Blue Motel Room" veers from the form.) Their rippling instruments evoke the uncanny surface of the pools in Hockney's California paintings, and the scant reliance on hooks encourages a sense of forward motion. (The New York Times' reviewer called it a -Los Angeles version of Kraftwerk's autobahn'.") This minimal backing lets Mitchell’s voice loose, as she sings in a meditative, instinctual fashion. "The poet took over the singer "' he said in 1998. "It's more like jazz melody, it's conversational improvisation."
This intimate, personal voice is key to Hejira, where Mitchell isolates herself from familiarity in order to confront her true nature. "In our possessive coupling/So much could not be expressed/So now I'm returning to myself /These things that you and I suppressed," she sings on the title track, as if taking her first deep breath in a long while. Hejira contains Mitchell's starkest and most sensitive examinations of the apparent incompatibility of love and work, belonging and freedom. Hejira lets Mitchell's duelling ideologies and impulses coexist at the same scale within each song, avoiding extremes of crisis or revelation, an idea reflected in the artwork. Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to edit together 14 different photos of varying perspectives - including an imposing Norman Seeff portrait - and then hired an air brusher to blend in the edges. "If I had done the cover as a collage, it would've looked much more primitive," she told Rock Photo. "This way it's so polished, as if it's exactly one photograph."
If art and love are in conflict, Mitchell's lucid relationship with that bind is unparalleled. "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs," she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996 [ed: actually, 2006], "but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me." Marrying Hissing's observational approach to the personal nature of Mitchell's earlier records, Hejira contains some of her most expansive and idiosyncratic writing, each song filled with unanswered questions about the definition and contradictions of fulfilment. Sometimes, that satisfaction is immediate. To be a solo travelling woman requires a heightened sensitivity to the environment, and Mitchell vibrates at the frequency of her gorgeous, sensory landscapes. There are towering pinewood trees and vivid blue skies streaked with vapour trails that look like "the hexagram of the heavens", or the strings of her guitar. Snow "gathers like bolts of lace waltzing on a ballroom girl" in the spacious "Hejira", where Mitchell sighs with gratitude at her synchronicity with her surroundings. "There's comfort in melancholy/When there's no need to explain/It's just as natural as the weather/In this moody sky today. "Her world is so vivid, it almost feels surreal at time.
As she acclimatises to the road, she clocks on to the behaviour of the characters she encounters. The dewy "Coyote" details a tryst with a philandering rancher (who may be Sam Shepard in disguise)- Mitchell knows that he has "a woman at home and another down the hall", but she enjoys their brief affair, and revels in his palpable consternation about whether to run away the next morning. "Coyote's in the coffee shop/He's staring a hole in his scrambled eggs/He picks up my scent on his fingers/While he's watching the waitresses' legs," she sings, high on intimate power. "You're not a hit-and-run driver, no no," she reassures him, having played him at his own game. Sex is purely pleasure on Hejira, Mitchell writing without shame or qualification as she steps outside of society's expectations. "All I reallywant right now/Is to find another lover," she confesses at one point, and she succeeds. She may have reservations about the "foolish and childish" protagonist of "A Strange Boy", but rationality barely matters out here. "We got high on travel/And we got drunk on alcohol/And on love, the strongest poison and medicine of all," she rhapsodises, sounding barely tethered to the earth. "See how that feeling comes and goes/Like the pull of moon on tide/ Now I am surf rising/Now parched ribs of sand at his side."
Supposedly alone in the world and enjoying "the sweet loneliness of solitary travel", as she would describe it, Mitchell forces herself to reckon with the part her that still craves contact, and comfort. "I'm porous with travel fever/But you know I'm so glad to be on my own/Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger/ Can setup trembling in my bones," she sings on "Hejira". The alternating keys of "Amelia", a tribute to the lost pilot Amelia Earhart, underscore Hejira's most poignant and uneasy interrogation of a woman's ineffable need to wander, and the sacrifices that entails. "Maybe I've never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude/And looking down on everything/I crashed into his arms," she rues.
No matter how far she gets from home, she can't escape her mind. "Oh radiant happiness/It was all so light and easy/'Til I started analysing/And I brought on my old ways/A thunderhead of judgement was gathering in my gaze," Mitchell sings on the melty, hiccuping "Refuge Of The Roads". Hejira offers no resolution between love and independence, both of which lead to a measure of isolation that Mitchell elucidates beautifully. Being tethered to someone means always being seen in reflection: "White flags of winter chimneys/Waving truce against the moon/In the mirrors of a modern bank/From the window of a hotel room," she sings on "Hejira". But a similarly desolate image in "Refuge" suggests that being alone means barely being seen at all. In a service station, she sees "a photograph of the earth/Taken coming back from the moon/And you couldn't see a city/On that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest of a highway/ Or me here least of all."
In The Rolling Stone Book Of Women In Rock, Lisa Kennedy writes that Mitchell's work up until Court And Spark was influenced by the prairie, and that what came after drew from the city. It's true of Hissing, Mingus and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, but Hejira is a psychological bridge connecting the two territories and all that they represent. The closest she comes to defining that irreconcilable pull between a woman's duty and desire is on energetic highlight "Song For Sharon". (It's the only song here written on cocaine, which may explain the pace.) "And the power of reason/And the flowers of deep feeling/Seem to serve me/Only to deceive me," she ruminates. It's no wonder, as she sings on "Refuge ... ", that her journey "made most people nervous/They just didn't want to know/What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads."
To this day in popular culture, most women on the road are doomed figures, fated to die or disappear. In 2013, the cultural critic Vanessa Veselka wrote an essay for The American Reader titled "The Lack Of Female Road Narratives And Why It Matters". "We recognize that, in our world, a woman on the road is marked," she writes. "She has been cut from the social fabric, excised at such an elemental level that when she steps onto the road, she steps into an abyss. And whatever leads up to that choice inspires in us a primal fear. A man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone."
Hejira remains one of the few counterexamples to this deficit - a restless rejection of what satisfaction and success is meant to look like for women as lovers and artists, and a fearless confrontation of the consequences that stem from rejecting the norm. It's perhaps the great feminist record: "Leaving the dream, no blame," indeed”.
It is clear was a change. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews, it is worth getting some words from Joni Mitchell. Hejira is an album that could not have come from anyone else. In 2006, for the Ottawa Citizen, Doug Fisher spoke with Joni Mitchell about a classic album that turned thirty. How she reflected on it then. I wonder if she will share any words on its fiftieth anniversary. It was such an important album in her career. One that she is clearly very proud of:
“Whenever Joni Mitchell had trouble sorting out her life, she took to the road. But in early 1976, with a turbulent love affair on the rocks and too many drugs in her body, she hit the highway almost with a vengeance.
"I was getting away from a romance, I was getting away from the craziness and I was searching for something to make sense of everything," she says. "The road became a metaphor for my life."
And it inspired the album many of her fans and music critics consider her masterpiece.
Released 30 years ago this week, the nine songs on Hejira form the remarkable personal journal of a nomadic, romantic dreamer whose aural notebook is filled with the stories of doomed love, late night roadhouse dance floors, wedding gown fantasies, lost chances and a deep yearning to escape and start over.
Mitchell is not convinced Hejira is the best of the 22 albums that made her among the most influential singer-songwriters, male or female, of the past 40 years. She won't attach that label to any of her albums.
'Hejira could only have come from me'
But she concedes Hejira is probably her one album that could not have been made by anyone else.
"I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me," she said an interview with the Citizen.
The stories they tell are so vivid, their observations so naked and the landscapes so haunting that Kris Kristofferson famously urged her in a letter to be "more self-protective ... to save something of yourself from public view."
But Mitchell says self-confession, no matter how risky and revealing, was essential to her writing during that era.
"My songs have always been more autobiographical than most people's," she says. "It pushes you toward honesty. I was just returning to normal from the extremities of a very abnormal mindset when I wrote most of the songs (on Hejira).
"When life gets interesting I get very alert, and life was very interesting. I think that took the writing to another level."
Mitchell talked about the album by phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade. More wary of public scrutiny these days, the Canadian singer agreed to a Citizen request to discuss Hejira because, she said, the album recalls an "interesting transitional" time in her life and her career.
Musically, Hejira certainly marked a departure from the two jazz-tinged but radio-friendly albums that preceded it. Gone were the hummable melodies, conventional formats and jaunty horn sections she used as Top 40 flirtations on 1974's Court and Spark and '75's The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
In their place, Mitchell offered seductively sparse rhythms, lush swirling guitars and the brilliant spark of Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass to create an unceasing musical motion that is as mesmerizing as the highways she travels in her songs.
The album is also a departure lyrically. Using the music's structural looseness to her advantage, Mitchell gives her words a simple directness and poetic polish seldom seen in her music before and rarely found again.
"To me, the whole Hejira album is really inspired," Mitchell says. "There is a rootlessness to it, for sure, but also discovery along the road."
Despite good reviews, Hejira did not sell as briskly as the more accessible albums Mitchell released during the first half of the 1970s. Although exact numbers are hard to get, there are indications sales of Hejira are stronger today than ever.
Voting on jonimitchell.com, an excellent fan-driven website, ranks Hejira as Mitchell's most popular album. A critics' poll done in the late 1990s placed the album in a first-place tie with the Blue, a moody collection of love songs she recorded in 1971.
Mitchell says Hejira's songs were written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976.
The first was a concert tour cancelled amid turmoil after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and her drummer boyfriend John Guerin ended their on-again, off-again relationship, this time seemingly for good.
Soon after, Mitchell signed on with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, a ragged, drug-soaked circus that also variously included Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Allan Ginsburg and members of the Band. She soon became a frequent cocaine user.
"I realized you couldn't stay on that thing straight -- you'd be the only one," she explains. "It was just insane." Looking back, she says, the drugs had both "great and disastrous" effects: "I had terrible insomnia but I wrote a lot of epic poems," including Song for Sharon, for many the masterpiece around which Hejira orbits.
In danger of losing her equilibrium, Mitchell fled for home in Los Angeles. She was only back a few days when two friends, one of them a former lover from Australia, showed up at her door proposing they drive across the country to New England.
Mitchell eventually dropped them in Maine before heading alone down the coast to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the southwest back to California.
"I was driving without a driver's licence," she remembers. "I had to stay behind truckers because they signal you when cops are ahead. I had to drive in daylight hours only to stay out of harm's way."
In the South, where hard rock and country music dominated the airwaves, Mitchell was a virtual unknown. "It was a relief. I was able, like The Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status."
The cross-country sojourn resulted in six of the songs on Hejira, which Mitchell says was originally called Travelling -- "that wouldn't have been very memorable," she jokes.
While looking through a dictionary, Mitchell came across the word "hejira," an Islamic term for exodus or breaking with the past. It became a song title -- and against the will of her record company, which wanted something less cryptic -- the name of the album.
"I'd been struggling with a title for the song," she says. "The idea of departure with honour captured the feeling I was after very well”.
Two reviews to come to before wrapping up. Culture Sonar showed love for an album that they felt was underappreciated. You could argue that. The last thing I will bring in is features where Joni Mitchell’s albums are ranked. Showing where Hejira comes:
“Everyone has albums they come back to again and again, albums they would take to their proverbial desert island. Such albums have made a deep connection to the heart, and to life experience, sometimes in ways we barely understand, or only slowly unpack as we grow older. For me there’s no contest. The album I never tire of, which speaks to me instantly and always, whose meaning has evolved and deepened for me over time: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira.
A bit of brush-clearing first:
I have many friends who simply can’t get past some aspects of Mitchell’s performances. There’s a prickliness in some of her work (and most definitely in her public statements), which I believe was well-earned through the struggle of navigating the classic rock boys club, but which can be confusing and off-putting at times. Her voice is a frequent focus of criticism, many finding it “pretentious” or “mannered.” I see the truth in these critiques, but at least on her best work (and I consider this album the best of her best), the rewards far outweigh the obstacles.
With that out of the way: if you haven’t heard Hejira, go right now and do that. It’s on YouTube in its entirety, though I strongly recommend buying it. Nothing I say can do it justice, but I can highlight some of what is so powerful about it in my view.
Mitchell’s rhythm guitar playing is unique and gorgeous. As elsewhere in her work, she relies on a wide range of bespoke tunings to achieve distinctive and rich voicings. On the opening track, “Coyote,” for example, she tunes to CGDFCE, a very odd setup which makes the hooky, haunting, chugging rhythm part quite easy to play.
Hejira is in some sense a concept album, documenting a long road trip across the country and back, after a tour which ended early in recrimination and romantic disappointment. There is a strong sense of place in every single song, and Mitchell evokes conversations and situations effortlessly and compellingly, giving other people in her life and travels a voice, telling fragments of their stories in ways which make them feel like people I have known myself. This kind of lyric writing is just plain hard to do well, and she makes it sound easy.
Mitchell has said that she found the “dead, distant” bass sound of 70s recordings very unsatisfying, and was told she should talk to Jaco Pastorius. If all this album accomplished was to give us the glory of the parts Jaco overdubbed on four of the songs, it would be a treasure. But it goes beyond the sheer beauty of those bass parts…Jaco seemed to understand Mitchell’s music intuitively, and everything he does makes the rest of her conception shine more brightly. The interplay between his bass and her guitar and voice feels like a playful but serious conversation between old friends.
And it wasn’t just Jaco who Mitchell gave scope to here. John Guerin on drums and Larry Carlton on electric guitar deliver some their best, most tasteful work, with just the right amount of assertiveness, skirting a line between folk-pop and jazz in a way I’ve never heard matched.
I can’t know what Hejira’s deeper meaning is to Mitchell, beyond the narrative elements she is playing with, but to me it evokes a deep longing, and serves as a somewhat sardonic but heartfelt elegy for failed dreams and broken promises, personal and social.
The atmosphere on this album sticks to me like glue, gets in everywhere, and every musical and production choice supports that effect. Mitchell and her producer Henry Lewy achieved great variety between tracks without once violating the sense of a continuous and encompassing world – it is a spectacular achievement.
And what is atmosphere on an album but the result of sound? So finally, that’s what makes Hejira what it is, more than any of the aspects I have discussed. It is a sound which envelops and caresses, teases and reveals, soothes and surprises, gently prodding the listener to offer attention to the story of “this hitcher…this prisoner, of the fine white lines, of the white lines on the free free way.”
Mitchell’s overall body of work has its issues, and her relationship with fame and the business of music has been…challenging. But no accounting of the history of modern songwriting and recording is complete without consideration of this kaleidoscopically beautiful album”.
In 2022, Pitchfork reviewed Hejira. It is, as they write, “an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music”. If anyone has not heard this Joni Mitchell masterpiece then you really need to. Whilst Ladies of the Canyon is my favourite album from her, I do really love Hejira and will always have respect for it:
“On “Hejira,” Mitchell interrogates her 32 years. She had made profound sacrifices for the sake of her art, which perhaps accounts for the music’s intensity: When you feel you’ve sacrificed everything for your work, you bring everything to it. She looked for answers in every corner of the country her car could reach. She poured in every reserve and inexhaustible query. What are the uses of solitude? How close to nerves and bone can you get? Is art worth the sacrifice? Could she ever fully be seen? Her music stretches into a dissolving horizon suggesting the questions are unanswerable. Its unresolved charge suggests that life will be a cycle of finding meaning in the questions. In the spartan space, Mitchell invites us to complete the picture.
Staring at headstones on “Hejira,” “those tributes to finality,” pondering death, she considered her life. “I looked at myself here,” she sings, “Chicken scratching for my immortality.” Even Joni Mitchell must sometimes feel meaningless, at the top of the mountain, wondering what everything is worth. She always said she embraced granular details in her autobiographical art songs because it made a better story, and people should “know who they’re worshiping.” Here she offers a metaphysical magnification of her most atomic truths.
We’re only particles of change
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone
Two other of Hejira’s songs illustrate as much. “Song for Sharon” is Mitchell’s reckoning with her position as single and childfree in her 30s, subverting the status quo in subject and in form. She’d addressed this reality before, like on For the Roses’ “Woman of Heart and Mind.” But in this nine-minute letter to her long-lost friend back home, Sharon Bell—who took a conventional path, “a husband and a farm”—she went further, surveying the advice she’d received from other women about how to give her life meaning: “have children,” “find yourself a charity.” With unbothered resolve and an even-handed tone—not innate for Mitchell—she situates herself between these two pathways of womanhood, seeking the common ground between herself and Sharon, or maybe between herself and all women, like her mother and grandmother who suppressed their dreams. “Song for Sharon” blows up the myth of the pop renegade with no direction home. Staring the past in the eye, Mitchell admits (in a call back to Blue’s “All I Want”), “All I really want to do right now is find another lover,” the last word drifting like smoke.
The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task.
Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female.
“Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”
Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde.
Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train.
The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one”.
Hejira doesn’t do too bad when we see ranking lists of Joni Mitchell’s albums. Earlier this year, Rough Trade ranked it first and said this: “You find yourself hanging on every word, wondering just how Joni will tie up every story in a deeply interesting arrangement. It is one of those albums that will change your life if you let it. I know it has changed mine”. In 2019, The Guardian placed it third: “This is definitely one for the road, evoking a hunger for movement, a sense of yearning and restlessness, that permeates every track. According to Mitchell, the album was written driving across the United States between Maine and Los Angeles. Amelia reflects upon the juxtaposition of concrete and skies after a break-up (an ode to the wild wings of Amelia Earhart – the urge to belong, the impulse to break free), whereas the album’s title track redirects us inwardly with the haunting, spine-tingling work of jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius”. On 21st November, the supreme and endlessly brilliant Hejira turns fifty. I wants to show love for a Joni Mitchell classic that is…
ARGUABLY her greatest album.
