Hexagrams of the Heavens: Hejira at 50
The song, full of light and air, may well be the most purely beautiful on the album, with Victor Feldman’s soulful vibes and Larry Carlton’s pointillist guitar harmonics as fine as the vapour trails at those icy altitudes: ‘It was the hexagram of the heavens / It was the strings of my guitar’. The lyrics are exquisite. Each verse presents a conundrum from which there is no escape. The strings of her guitars might well be the bars of a prison; ‘life becomes a travelogue’ with no exit; paradise is false; the roads are ‘cursed and charmed’; Icarus flies too high and plunges to his death; and, finally, she crashes into someone’s arms.
By Richard Skinner.