By Richard Skinner.
‘I never thought of myself so much as a confessional songwriter, but in order that my work should have vitality I felt I should write in my own blood.’
— Joni Mitchell
David Bowie, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell are three artists whose music I was introduced to at a very young age. My dad loves jazz and Miles’ music was always playing around the house as I was growing up, as were Heroes and Hejira, both of which my older sister used to play. Of course, I didn’t know it then, but I was being exposed (like radiation) to the best of the best. Since then, these artists have become role models to me. It’s not about the work – I would say that I like less than half of all the work these artists produced – it’s about how they conducted themselves as artists. All three of them were restless, never sitting on their laurels, always remaking themselves, looking for new forms. The music they produced was just a byproduct of that journey; the most important thing was the process, not the end product. The albums that these three artists produced are like sketchbooks, collections of ideas at that time and released as afterthoughts. No sooner had one of their albums come out than they had started on another. Their fearlessness was both frightening and inspirational. For them, there was no such thing as ‘failure’.
Most people would cite Blue as Joni Mitchell’s best album but, in my view, that accolade must go to Hejira, which turns 50 this year. Don’t get me wrong, I think Blue is a great album, but I think Hejira shows a greater maturity, especially in the lyrics. Mitchell was greatly impressed with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Hejira is her response. ‘[Dylan] inspired me with the idea of the personal narrative,’ she said, ‘He would speak as if to one person in a song. Like “you got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.”’ On Hejira, Joni adopts this personal narrative idea. She uses herself as a blank canvas and fills it in as she goes. It’s a cartography of her wandering heart, its ‘degree zero’. ‘I feel a lot of people could have written “Chelsea Morning”,’ she once said, ‘but I don’t think anyone else could have written the songs on Hejira.’
In early 1976, Mitchell was on tour promoting The Hissing of Summer Lawns. At that time she was romantically involved with the drummer of her touring band, John Guerin, an on-off relationship that ended suddenly and finally after a Madison, Wisconsin show on Sunday 29th February. Mitchell was devastated. The remaining tour dates were cancelled and Mitchell fled to Neil Young’s Malibu beach house. She knew she had to get away, to travel, but didn’t know where or who with. Out of the blue, two friends turned up at the house, one of whom, an old boyfriend of Joni’s from Australia, had a three-week visa to travel to Maine on a mission to retrieve his child from a grandparent. The two men invited her along and she said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you. I’m gone.’ They drove in Joni’s white Mercedes 280SE on a wild goose chase all the way to Maine, where she dropped them off (she has never revealed the outcome of that particular mission).
Mitchell then took a long, discursive solo road trip back towards LA, taking in New York, Florida, through the Deep South, including New Orleans, along the Gulf of Mexico, the Sonoran Desert in Arizona and a three-day stay at a Buddhist retreat in Boulder, Colorado. She either stayed in her car or in anonymous motels, sometimes under an alias, and in lighthouses along the Gulf coast. She wore a red wig in New Orleans to disguise herself but she was still recognised. Mitchell didn’t have a driver’s license so she drove behind truckers who would signal when the police were approaching. All this time she was writing the songs on her guitar that would end up on Hejira. She didn’t come across many pianos on her trips, which explains the absence of piano songs on the album.
Back in LA, the guitarist from her touring band, Robben Ford, played Joni the debut album by fretless bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius. She was blown away by what she heard and saw in Pastorius a kindred spirit whose freestyle approach to his instrument matched her own liking for open tunings. ‘I feel like I dreamed Jaco,’ she later said. She invited him to come to LA to record. He provided multi-tracked overdubs on four of the songs: “Coyote”, “Hejira”, “Black Crow” and “Refuge of the Roads”. Hejira is unthinkable without Pastorius’ playing. On the album, there are touches of vibes, horns, clarinet and harmonica but Pastorius’ bass is the liquid pulse throughout. It’s the live feed.
The first song Joni had ready for Hejira was “Coyote”, which was actually written while she was part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review tour in November 1975. Reputedly about a one night stand with fellow tour traveller, actor and playwright, Sam Shepard, but the person addressed in the song – Coyote – is a symbol of anyone who lives life as an opportunistic loner. The song is full of restless energy, a road romance captured with a cinematographer’s eye and metaphysical poet’s wit. In the lyrics, Mitchell is being manipulated, but she knows it and is complicit. ‘No regrets, Coyote’, she says.
“Amelia” is a paean to doomed aviator Amelia Earhart, the patron saint of solo voyagers. It’s a death song about disappearance. ‘In this song, was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another… sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.’ 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. The end of the song brings its aviation theme full circle and closes with one of the most striking images on the whole album: ‘I dreamed of 747s / Over geometric farms / Dreams Amelia – dreams and false alarms’. And what exactly are those ‘false alarms’? ‘Basically, the false alarm was the end of a relationship,’ she says. ‘Two Scorpios couldn’t let each other go. It was done, but we couldn’t let go; we belonged to each other. It was winding down and I am driving solo without a driver’s licence across the country. I think of Amelia. I think solo flight. I can’t remember how many hotel rooms later it was complete.’
The title track is probably the most ‘confessional’ of all the songs. It’s a breakup song, but there is no self pity or blame attached. It’s an acceptance of, submission even, to her situation. A song filled with unanswered questions about love and work, belonging and freedom. The word ‘hejira’ is Arabic and refers to Mohammed’s flight from Mecca. It roughly translates as ‘running away, honourably’. An internal defection.
When you travel long distances, as Mitchell did on that meandering road trip, you can get into a meditative state of mind. After a while, your mind empties itself and then you are able to reach much deeper into your own being. Like a mystic, Mitchell found illumination in those desert visions and transcribed them. Most of the songs on Hejira are addressed to someone but not the title track. On “Hejira” she is addressing herself and there is world-weariness in her confession. She is quoted as saying that the lyrics of this song were the hardest to write and maybe that’s because the song is the most personal on the record.
Along the way, Mitchell stopped off at a music shop called Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island, New York, where she bought a Mandocello and a 1915 Martin herringbone acoustic guitar. On the ferry back to New York City, she began writing “Song for Sharon”. The song unfolds over 10 verses, the longest on the record, an engrossing meditation on matrimony, teenage dreams and midlife suicides (allegedly a reference to Jackson Browne’s wife, the fashion model Phyllis Major, who killed herself in March 1976). The Sharon in the song is Mitchell’s old childhood friend Sharon Bell. Of the two, it was Sharon who, as a child, entered classical competitions and wanted to be a pop singer. Joni liked the countryside and wanted to marry a farmer. The song is a vehicle to address that role reversal, to say that our lives don’t always turn out the way we thought they would. “Song for Sharon” is my particular favourite on the album. It’s pure poetry in song form and easily the equal of anything by Adrienne Rich or Sharon Olds.
The album’s closing track, “Refuge of the Roads”, was written about the three days that Mitchell spent with ‘a friend of spirit’, the controversial meditation master Chögyam Trungpa at his Buddhist retreat in Boulder, Colorado. According to Mitchell, she fell into an ‘awakened’ state for three days, with no sense of self, no self-consciousness, a new experience for Mitchell and one she was eternally grateful for. ‘I consider him one of my great teachers, even though I saw him only three times.’
On her previous album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, only one song – “Sweet Bird” – was written in the first-person singular (and what a beautiful song it is, too). The other songs were third-person character studies or examinations of social hierarchies: the gangster’s moll Edith; the woman in “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” standing up to patriarchy; the young southern belle in “Shades of Scarlet Conquering” modelling herself on the image of Scarlett O’Hara; the woman trapped in a failing marriage in “Harry’s House/Centrepiece”. All these beautiful, searing songs are very impressionistic. ‘[On The Hissing of Summer Lawns] I began to write social description as opposed to personal confession,’ Michell said.
Hejira, however, returns her to her ‘confessional’ mode (Mitchell preferred the term ‘penitence of spirit’). On the album, she ditches the use of choruses in all of the songs to produce nine free-form poems. Whereas much of her earlier work could be compared to writers such as Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, on Hejira she is a Beat poet, writing about her lived experience on the road as it happened. ‘The poet took over the singer,’ she said in 1998. ‘It’s more like jazz melody, it’s conversational improvisation.’
The characters she meets or talks about along the way – Coyote, Amelia Earhart, Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis, the ‘strange’ boy (who was actually one of her companions on the trip to Maine), Sharon Bell, Chögyam Trungpa – act as mirrors, or maybe as lightning rods, drawing emotional energy for Mitchell to check her pulse, to find the truth of her situation, her authenticity.
Despite the ‘femininity’ of her music, Mitchell has always strongly objected to being cast as a spokeswoman of specifically feminine feelings. Instead, she prefers to see her music as androgynous, written and performed from neither a female nor a male perspective. Like her contemporary Janis Joplin, Mitchell has also insisted on the interracial character of her music and of her own persona. As she has said in interviews, ‘I was girlie, “twee”, as the English might say. I got more tooth later. One of my favourite compliments was from a blind black piano player who said that my work was raceless and genderless. I considered that a true honour coming from him. I set out to get rid of the girlie part to give it strength.’
A couple of years ago, in anticipation of writing this essay, I posted a call out on social media asking for people’s opinions on what kind of an artist they thought Joni Mitchell was. The best response I received was from a woman called Bridget McKenzie, who said: ‘My instinct is to say she resembles no others. But that’s partly because I don’t know enough names and opuses of US female poets to compare her to. She’s like a jazz poet, or spoken word artist, quite free-flowing and magpie-ish. Freshly reflecting on experience, patching together the inside and the outside.’ This is as good a description as any I’ve heard and it will do.
As I mentioned before, I first became aware of Hejira at around 15 when my older sister used to play it. Without my knowing, Joni Mitchell’s overexposed thoughts and experiences that floated around the house were seeping into my consciousness. In 1983, when I was 18, my sister and I went to see Joni Mitchell live in London. I only have vague recollections of the concert, but setlist dot com tells me that she played “Coyote”, “Amelia”, “Song for Sharon” and “Refuge of the Roads” that night. I don’t remember any of those, but I do remember her playing her dulcimer.
Truth be told, I don’t listen to Hejira very often these days. I must have played that album a thousand times and I know every word. It’s in my DNA. Emotionally speaking, it doesn’t cut you a lot of slack. Like Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver or Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens, Hejira cuts very close to the bone. One day, in my early 20s, I remember lying on grass at home and looking up, listening to “Amelia” on my Walkman. In that moment, I was transported to Joni picturing Amelia flying in the ‘blue, blue sky’. I didn’t know then that this album would stay with me forever, but it has. For me, it’s the blueprint for any artist’s authenticity, integrity and creativity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and essayist. He has written a novel about Erik Satie, entitled The Velvet Gentleman (Faber & Faber), which was shortlisted for a prize in France. In his three essay collections, Richard has written about The Beach Boys, Luc Ferrari, R.E.M., David Sylvian, & Iannis Xenakis, among many others. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Sound magazine’s ‘Buried Treasure’ column including pieces about Holger Czukay, Robert Palmer & Vangelis, among others. And for 3:AM magazine, he has written longer pieces about Talking Heads & Mercury Rev.
