Album: Hejira
Recorded: 1976
Released: November 1976
Despite Max Bennett's alienation from Joni during the recording of Hejira – many of the sessions were recorded separately and overdubbed later – he still contributed the wonderful bass parts to Furry Sings The Blues and Song For Sharon. The figure of Old Furry is a reference to bluesman Furry Lewis who played on Beale Steet in Memphis ("Pawn shops glitter like gold tooth caps / in the grey decay"), a site that Joni visited on her travels before it was destroyed. Black Crow is another song about travel, an exhausting quest for "love and music" and whatever is new and "shiny", and the harsh music matches the sense in the lyrics of Joni feeling corrupted by her own desires.
Hejira is very much the work of a mature artist, musing on turning 30 and reflecting with sober clarity on the highs and lows of love, drugs and the creative life. The wonderfully written title track is one of the prime examples, its lyrics expressing alienation but also the splendid isolation of having “defected from the petty wars” of her relationship with Guerin. Joni also reflects on her own mortality and posterity, in the same way Nick Drake did in Fruit Tree, calling herself a "chicken scratching for my immortality". Musically, the track sounds to me like John Martyn's Bless The Weather, a fusion of folk and jazz, and was one of the first songs Joni recorded with Pastorius.
Two other highlights on the LP are Song For Sharon and the closing track. Song For Sharon has 10 verses that seem to have been written frantically on coke without a chorus or bridge, yet despite the apparent lack of coherence or editing, the song has a strong emotional centre, written almost like a poignant letter to her childhood friend (Sharon Bell). It was also inspired by the death of Phyllis Major, a model who married Jackson Browne and who later committed suicide – the song ends with an evocation of Psalm 23, making Joni sound like an awakened sinner. The album finale Refuge Of The Roads is about the anonymity of travelling in the Deep South, where Joni checked into motels under pseudonyms and met ordinary folk who didn’t recognise her. Her Buddhist teacher Trungpa advised Joni to stop analysing everything (“turn off your mind and float downstream”) but Refuge Of The Road is about her inability to ever do so. This song also evokes an awakening of sorts.
Hejira finds Mitchell at the peak of her powers both as a singer and songwriter, but still taking risks and branching out into successful new musical ventures, in the process creating a new pop / folk / jazz / world music sound that is almost sui generis. The album influenced various artists from Kate Bush to Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello and Tori Amos and was also apparently the last record Prince bought before his death. It's become one of my personal favourites.
Highlights: Coyote, Amelia, Hejira, Song For Sharon, Refuge Of The Road
Album rating: A+
Recorded: 1976
Released: November 1976
Songs / length: 9 / 52:18
Whereas Hissing Of Summer Lawns was about women trapped by circumstance, Hejira is about freedom, travel and the open road. The LP's title song was originally called Traveling but Joni found an Arabic alternative – Hejira (meaning a journey of escape to safety, and a word that has similar connotations to the Christian word exodus). Abandoning her Hissing Of Summer Lawns tour midway through in late February 1976, in part because her relationship with LA Express drummer John Guerin had broken down, Joni was holed up at Neil Young's Malibu home when an Australian ex-lover and a young flight attendant (who inspired the song, A Strange Boy) turned up asking if she'd like to join them on a road trip to Maine.
Many of Hejira’s songs were written on this road trip, while the musical seeds of the album were also sown when a friend recommended listening to Jaco Pastorius’ debut LP. Though Pastorius was not the first fretless bass player (notable musicians like Jack Bruce and John Paul Jones played without frets too), he was widely considered to be the first virtuoso, keeping immaculate time but always adding inventive flourishes and employing a wide range. Joni talked of Pastorius like a kindred spirit, a musical foil who was her equal in terms of creative power and someone who reinvented the electric bass in the same way Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar.
Pastorius plays on 4 of the album's songs, including opener Coyote (making it sound like the feeling of driving on the open road), Hejira, Black Crow and Refuge Of The Roads. Coyote was written while Joni was part of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, with lyrics inspired by her love affair with Sam Shephard, while Furry Sings The Blues was written on the Hissing Of Summer Lawns tour and recorded with Neil Young (on harmonica). Coyote has a hypnotic beauty thanks to Pastorius' harmonic bass lines and the lyrics speak of the alienation of living with a wolflike man who enjoys stalking women, but also a sense of being trapped by the "white lines" (cocaine) of the freeway and a strong attachment to her ego. Joni had spent some of 1976 with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, who helped her overcome her cocaine addiction, and both Hejira's opening and closing songs reflect on this process of awakening.
Pastorius was not the only key musical contributor to Hejira, with guitarist Larry Carlton playing the lyrical accompaniment to the album's second song Amelia, about aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who reinvented what a woman could be four decades before Joni and who was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean. Joni finds commonalities between her own pioneering life and Amelia's ("I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes") and the emotion in her voice when she sings of a "false alarm" suggests something much deeper at play, perhaps a pregnancy scare or the feeling of missing out on a partner for life ("Maybe I’ve never really loved"). Everything from the poetic lyrics to the meditative music makes this one of Joni's masterpieces.
Whereas Hissing Of Summer Lawns was about women trapped by circumstance, Hejira is about freedom, travel and the open road. The LP's title song was originally called Traveling but Joni found an Arabic alternative – Hejira (meaning a journey of escape to safety, and a word that has similar connotations to the Christian word exodus). Abandoning her Hissing Of Summer Lawns tour midway through in late February 1976, in part because her relationship with LA Express drummer John Guerin had broken down, Joni was holed up at Neil Young's Malibu home when an Australian ex-lover and a young flight attendant (who inspired the song, A Strange Boy) turned up asking if she'd like to join them on a road trip to Maine.
Many of Hejira’s songs were written on this road trip, while the musical seeds of the album were also sown when a friend recommended listening to Jaco Pastorius’ debut LP. Though Pastorius was not the first fretless bass player (notable musicians like Jack Bruce and John Paul Jones played without frets too), he was widely considered to be the first virtuoso, keeping immaculate time but always adding inventive flourishes and employing a wide range. Joni talked of Pastorius like a kindred spirit, a musical foil who was her equal in terms of creative power and someone who reinvented the electric bass in the same way Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar.
Pastorius plays on 4 of the album's songs, including opener Coyote (making it sound like the feeling of driving on the open road), Hejira, Black Crow and Refuge Of The Roads. Coyote was written while Joni was part of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, with lyrics inspired by her love affair with Sam Shephard, while Furry Sings The Blues was written on the Hissing Of Summer Lawns tour and recorded with Neil Young (on harmonica). Coyote has a hypnotic beauty thanks to Pastorius' harmonic bass lines and the lyrics speak of the alienation of living with a wolflike man who enjoys stalking women, but also a sense of being trapped by the "white lines" (cocaine) of the freeway and a strong attachment to her ego. Joni had spent some of 1976 with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, who helped her overcome her cocaine addiction, and both Hejira's opening and closing songs reflect on this process of awakening.
Pastorius was not the only key musical contributor to Hejira, with guitarist Larry Carlton playing the lyrical accompaniment to the album's second song Amelia, about aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who reinvented what a woman could be four decades before Joni and who was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean. Joni finds commonalities between her own pioneering life and Amelia's ("I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes") and the emotion in her voice when she sings of a "false alarm" suggests something much deeper at play, perhaps a pregnancy scare or the feeling of missing out on a partner for life ("Maybe I’ve never really loved"). Everything from the poetic lyrics to the meditative music makes this one of Joni's masterpieces.
Despite Max Bennett's alienation from Joni during the recording of Hejira – many of the sessions were recorded separately and overdubbed later – he still contributed the wonderful bass parts to Furry Sings The Blues and Song For Sharon. The figure of Old Furry is a reference to bluesman Furry Lewis who played on Beale Steet in Memphis ("Pawn shops glitter like gold tooth caps / in the grey decay"), a site that Joni visited on her travels before it was destroyed. Black Crow is another song about travel, an exhausting quest for "love and music" and whatever is new and "shiny", and the harsh music matches the sense in the lyrics of Joni feeling corrupted by her own desires.
Hejira is very much the work of a mature artist, musing on turning 30 and reflecting with sober clarity on the highs and lows of love, drugs and the creative life. The wonderfully written title track is one of the prime examples, its lyrics expressing alienation but also the splendid isolation of having “defected from the petty wars” of her relationship with Guerin. Joni also reflects on her own mortality and posterity, in the same way Nick Drake did in Fruit Tree, calling herself a "chicken scratching for my immortality". Musically, the track sounds to me like John Martyn's Bless The Weather, a fusion of folk and jazz, and was one of the first songs Joni recorded with Pastorius.
I know no one's going to show me everything,
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone
Two other highlights on the LP are Song For Sharon and the closing track. Song For Sharon has 10 verses that seem to have been written frantically on coke without a chorus or bridge, yet despite the apparent lack of coherence or editing, the song has a strong emotional centre, written almost like a poignant letter to her childhood friend (Sharon Bell). It was also inspired by the death of Phyllis Major, a model who married Jackson Browne and who later committed suicide – the song ends with an evocation of Psalm 23, making Joni sound like an awakened sinner. The album finale Refuge Of The Roads is about the anonymity of travelling in the Deep South, where Joni checked into motels under pseudonyms and met ordinary folk who didn’t recognise her. Her Buddhist teacher Trungpa advised Joni to stop analysing everything (“turn off your mind and float downstream”) but Refuge Of The Road is about her inability to ever do so. This song also evokes an awakening of sorts.
Hejira finds Mitchell at the peak of her powers both as a singer and songwriter, but still taking risks and branching out into successful new musical ventures, in the process creating a new pop / folk / jazz / world music sound that is almost sui generis. The album influenced various artists from Kate Bush to Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello and Tori Amos and was also apparently the last record Prince bought before his death. It's become one of my personal favourites.
Highlights: Coyote, Amelia, Hejira, Song For Sharon, Refuge Of The Road
Album rating: A+
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