- Joni Mitchell
”A Decade Full of Dreams”
We are here to talk about the 1976 Joni Mitchell album ’Hejira’. But if we take our time in getting to it, wind our way round some serpentine curves, wouldn’t that be the most *’Hejira’* way of going about things?
The NME Book of Rock, the first music book I ever read, described Mitchell as a “singer/songwriter with a pure voice, specialising in highly-wrought emotional ballads… notorious for various romantic attachments”. A widespread notion which reaches its nadir in the notion that her music’s ‘confessional’, like an emotional version of striptease. (Notably, its a term she always disliked.)
And some still see her through that frame, the epitome of a hippy-dippy Sixties artist, going gooey over clouds, getting wide-eyed about Woodstock and falling in love with passers-by every few minutes. But they mistake the overture for the act. It’s the early-to-mid Seventies where she came into her own.
It's the first two albums which most match that popular image, and while they do contain some great tracks there’s also times where she sounds like Phoebe from ’Friends.’ Mitchell herself later conceded “to me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.” It was the third try, ’Ladies of the Canyon,’ which first brought in the changes. Released in 1970, it meant that for Mitchell the Sixties ended right on cue.
A few numbers, such as the title track, could have come from the earlier albums. But mostly it pointed forwards. Which also meant wider. While the earlier albums had featured occasional bass, extra instruments came to be used more expansively. But perhaps most significant of all was the guitar-sporting folkie making greater use of piano.
It was followed by ’Blue’ (1971), which capitalised on all of this and is regarded by some as her best album. And where the title track made it clear which element she was channelling - “Blue/ Songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before”. Then on ’River’ she imagines the titular body of water as something she could “skate away on”. (Yes, skate. She was Canadian.) And her piano-based music came to flow like a river. Which went with something else…
Leonard Cohen, particularly on his earlier albums, set his songs in a heightened realm, full of slightly mystic characters doing richly symbolic things. It is something of a wrench to hear that famous lines in ’Suzanne’ may have been inspired by someone called Suzanne making him a cup of tea and putting bits of orange in it.
While other songwriters use a more straightforward, conversational style, directly addressing the listener in a way which feels immediate and involving. (Think of how many songs are sung second-person, to “you”.) As John Lennon put it: “say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.” Sinead O’Connor’s ’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ would be an example, with its payoff line “you asked for the truth and I told you.” If you were ever to find out that the song wasn’t a faithful description of her life at the point you couldn’t help but feel it was lessened.
And these are diverging approaches, branching off from each other. You need to pick one.
Well, maybe me or you would. And most people seem convinced Joni Mitchell picked the second. But she didn’t. Instead, she straight out refused to pick. And she seems able to slip between the two irreconcilable opposites within a single line. At times she’d deliberately juxtapose them for effect…
“She speaks in sorry sentences
“Miraculous repentances
“I don't believe her.”
…the punchy immediacy of the last line added like a pin to a balloon.
And this created a kind of double virtue. You feel like something significant is being imparted while, at the very same time, that she’s talking straight to you. ’Song For Sharon’ (which we’ll get to, promise) is written as if a letter to a long-time friend, casually mentioning Dora and Betsy as if we know them.
And the flowing piano enhanced this, enabled her lyrics to be more free-flowing and semi-stream-of-consciousness. Her tracks can have the buzz of meeting up with an old friend, where the torrent of conversation seems both effortless and endless, something to ride. It gives it a compulsive quality, the exhilarating feeling of being absolutely in the moment. (Yeah okay, she’s the only one doing the talking. It still feels that way.) And the immediacy of music, the sense that it’s all happening now, is always a positive feature.
And these go on to work as part of a triple whammy, with her Seventies shift in subject matter. ’California’ starts:
“Sitting in a park in Paris, France
“Reading the news, it sure looks bad
“They won't give peace a chance
“That was just a dream some of us had”
…and this just one year after she’d written the hippie anthem ’Woodstock’! John Lennon, the one who’d coined ‘give peace a chance’, later sang “the dream is over.” Yet where he was rueful she was phlegmatic. Her tone is “remember when we thought that peace stuff? Boy, what had we been smoking?” From that point on the song moves on to other subjects, like waking and shrugging off a strange dream.
Mitchell has said she saw her generation as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the stultifying, conformist Fifties. “Out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it. [But] I was not a part of that.”
Except of course the writer of ’Woodstock’ was. Giving up on social change after finding out you won’t be given it seems pretty on-brand for that description. With Mitchell, as with many others, the dominant subject of her music became herself. On the afore-mentioned ’Song For Sharon’ she sang, out loud and upfront:
“Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
“And lovely landscapes to discover
“But all I really want right now
“Is... find another lover”
And its the self-importance of singer-songwriters which so often grates. The genre often feels like First Word problems recited over some strummed guitar. Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck once called it the “privileging of individual angst”, while Mclusky recorded an album acidly titled ’My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours’.
All true. Except there’s a crucial difference between Mitchell recording ’Hejira’ and Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker. An artist’s first responsibility is to find what they’re good at and do that. There’s not a lot to be gained in demanding they write a song calling for the military-industrial complex be dissolved if their talents lie elsewhere. Mitchell was made to sing about the bittersweet richness of life, in all its complexities and self-contradictions. If it took her a little while to get round to that, she still got there. And anyway, personal relations, aren’t they part of life too? Or should we be stamping down Jericho full time?
As she said herself: “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.” Or as she sang herself…
“People will tell you where they got
“They’ll tell you where to go
“But till you’ve got there yourself
“You never really know”
Besides, in her case that free-flowing, semi-conversational style mitigates against self-absorption. (Or at least too much of it.) She sings less like she’s shining a spotlight on her personal dramas and more like she’s catching up with us.
And also, for someone supposedly so self-obsessive, Mitchell could be acutely observational, pinning people with a phrase…
“Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure its stricken from your uniform
But you can’t get it our of your eyes”
And once more, there’s a companion musical shift. As said, post-’Blue’ she started the move to a fuller band. The music grew more intricate, bringing in brass and strings. This grew slowly, but was unmistakable by 1975’s ’The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, which even incorporated the jazz standard ’Centrepiece’.
’Ladies of the Canyon’ had, clearly enough, been her Laurel Canyon album, the backpackers and freewheeling hippies who passed through it drawn from her own crowd. Songs are like quick snapshots of life happening around her, friends caught in character poses. While ’Summer Lawns’ is definitely her take on LA – “the city of the fallen angels”. Its like a film, with a cast list full of larger-than-life figures. Which means the most inventive, the most musically rich Mitchell album is the one most concerned with artificiality. (“Beauty parlour blondes with credit card eyes/ Looking for the chic and the fancy/ To buy.”)
But then there’s a bend in the road.
By this point the ‘studio album’, rich with effects and overlays, had become a thing you did - cemented in the popular mind with ’Sergeant Pepper’. And, as with that example, there wasn’t much to do once you’d gone there but reverse back out again - go back to what you were doing before. And at least in part ’Hejira’ does this, goes back to the simpler and more direct songs of ’Blue’. Precisely one track has more than four players, most have three.
But at the same time the sound became more jazzy. Mitchell had always been as much a Jazz as a Folk fan and, feeling Rock musicians lacked finesse, she started to work with Jazz players. Perhaps starting off with LA Express playing on her 1974 album ’Court and Spark’. Which ended with the Jazz cover… yes cover, ‘Twisted’. But ’Hejira’ was the first of her albums to incorporate the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius, and involved her singing evocatively about “strains of Benny Goodman”. So the album which went back simultaneously went forwards. 'Summer Lawns’ had worn its sophistication on its sleeve, while ’Hejira’ held it closer to the heart.
Now Jazz to me is like chilli or garlic. You wouldn’t want to taste it on its own too much, but it can serve well when added to other things. And when added to Folk it creates a kind of sweet ’n’ sour. (Just think Pentangle.) This fretless playing just went with her lyrics, free-form music to give wing to her free-form narrative. (Not unlike Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.)
”Porous With Travel Fever”
Also, if the element running through ’Blue’ had been water, and the instrument piano, this changes too. This album featured not a note of piano. On ’Amelia’, she sees the vapour trails of six planes in the sky, and likens them to guitar strings. A track named, of course, after the aviation pioneer. Elsewhere she paid tribute to those “who’ll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline.” The music doesn’t seem even as bank-bound as ’Blue’, but passing in jets and flurries like air streams.
As is often, the immediate reason for the switch was simple and practical. It was largely written on a road trip across America, from LA to Maine, and a guitar had simply gone in the van easier. At one point she describes coming across a piano mid-journey, and falling on it like an ex-lover. But that necessity was fortuitous. When she picked up a guitar again, it was as if it was a new instrument. The result was, if not in the standard sense, a classic air guitar album.
And, yes, travel… The observant reader might want to point out she had written about travel before. Often, in fact. ’Blue’ had opened with the line “I am on a lonely road and I’m travelling”. But those travel songs tended to focus on place. ’California’ was sung to California, as if to a person. Here the travel itself was the thing, the road runs through the whole album. One track is titled *’The Refuge of the Roads’* and the highway appears on the cover superimposed over her figure, as if it’s what she has inside - a space where you’d expect a presence. She said herself:
“I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”
The title track opens with “I’m travelling in some vehicle/ I’m sitting in some cafe”, and its the “some” which sticks out. It’s the smooth transience of the road which soothes you, like rubbing a succession of freshly laundered hotel towels across your cheek. Freedom is the absence of snags and ties, passing through places the way a ghost walks through walls. On ’Coyote’ the road offers odd-couple romances and one-night-stands, inoculated against entanglements. Because all the time you’re in some place you’re just some person, unencumbered by the associations and expectations of those who ‘know’ you.
She sang “Your life becomes a travelogue/ Of picture postcard charms.” And the songs are like travelogues, flitting from one incident to the next, passing a farmhouse on fire or a couple sitting out on a rock.
The result’s an album that’s literally as free as air. Not in the sports commentator sense of “I literally don’t know what literally means”, but literally as free as air. Drums, which usually play a grounding role in music, are so sedate you pretty much need to check the track listing to know when they’re there. (They appear on four tracks, percussion on three, while two feature neither, seeing as you asked.)
But then there’s a curve in the road.
Like a yin/yang sign, pursue one course for long enough and it’ll bend and turn and become its opposite. And with that in mind it would be tempting to take songs as antonyms, set the floaty, gossamer-light title track and ’Amelia’, the world seen from “clouds at icy altitudes”, against ’Song For Sharon’, with it’s more distinct pulse, and self-confessed hankering for human attachment. But, as is often the way with Mitchell, nothing is so clear-cut…
Faulkner wrote the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. He probably wasn’t thinking about Joni Mitchell, but he might as well have been. She writes not like she’s providing some summation of her life, where it all led to this, but mapping the beats of her heart. And ’Hejira’ frequently returns to her conflict between this wanderlust and a desire for the most tied of all knots. Described by her as ”the strongest poison and medicine of all.” Brought on not by a love affair, a one night stand or even a crush, but by spying “the long white dress of love” in a Staten Island window.
“In our possessive coupling
“So much could not be expressed
“So now I am returning to myself
“These things that you and I suppressed”
But later in the same song she adds:
“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 set up a trembling in my bones”
And this is (as promised earlier) ’Song For Sharon’, sung as a letter to a home-town friend. Notably, Sharon’s possessions are material, Mitchell’s metaphysical…
“Sharon you've got a husband
“And a family and a farm
“I've got the apple of temptation
“And a diamond snake around my arm”
The concluding track is ’Refuge of the Roads’ as if Mitchell never really returned from that trip. But ’Song For Sharon’, the longest number, feels like the album’s centrepiece. Ultimately she doesn’t resolve any of this, or even try to. She just tells us it like it was.
To sum up… Heading for another drudgeful and demanding day of work one Monday morning with ’Hejira’ playing in my head, I figured that whatever transpired after I arrived, in that moment I was in free transit. An album that even makes Monday mornings more bearable. Who could ask for more?
No comments:
Post a Comment