\u2018I 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.\u2019
\n\u2014 Joni Mitchell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u2019 music was always playing around the house as I was growing up, as were Heroes<\/em> and Hejira<\/em>, both of which my older sister used to play. Of course, I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s not about the work \u2013 I would say that I like less than half of all the work these artists produced \u2013 it\u2019s 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 \u2018failure\u2019.<\/p>\nMost people would cite Blue<\/em> as Joni Mitchell\u2019s best album but, in my view, that accolade must go to Hejira<\/em>, which turns 50 this year. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I think Blue<\/em> is a great album, but I think Hejira<\/em> shows a greater maturity, especially in the lyrics. Mitchell was greatly impressed with Bob Dylan\u2019s Blood on the Tracks<\/em> and Hejira<\/em> is her response. \u2018[Dylan] inspired me with the idea of the personal narrative,\u2019 she said, \u2018He would speak as if to one person in a song. Like \u201cyou got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.\u201d\u2019 On Hejira<\/em>, Joni adopts this personal narrative idea. She uses herself as a blank canvas and fills it in as she goes. It\u2019s a cartography of her wandering heart, its \u2018degree zero\u2019. \u2018I feel a lot of people could have written \u201cChelsea Morning\u201d,\u2019 she once said, \u2018but I don\u2019t think anyone else could have written the songs on Hejira<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\nIn early 1976, Mitchell was on tour promoting The Hissing of Summer Lawns<\/em>. 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\u2019s Malibu beach house. She knew she had to get away, to travel, but didn\u2019t know where or who with. Out of the blue, two friends turned up at the house, one of whom, an old boyfriend of Joni\u2019s 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, \u2018I\u2019ve been waiting for you. I\u2019m gone.\u2019 They drove in Joni\u2019s 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).<\/p>\nMitchell 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\u2019t have a driver\u2019s 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<\/em>. She didn\u2019t come across many pianos on her trips, which explains the absence of piano songs on the album.<\/p>\nBack 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. \u2018I feel like I dreamed Jaco,\u2019 she later said. She invited him to come to LA to record. He provided multi-tracked overdubs on four of the songs: \u201cCoyote\u201d, \u201cHejira\u201d, \u201cBlack Crow\u201d and \u201cRefuge of the Roads\u201d. Hejira is unthinkable without Pastorius\u2019 playing. On the album, there are touches of vibes, horns, clarinet and harmonica but Pastorius\u2019 bass is the liquid pulse throughout. It\u2019s the live feed.
\nThe first song Joni had ready for Hejira was \u201cCoyote\u201d, which was actually written while she was part of Bob Dylan\u2019s 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 \u2013 Coyote \u2013 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\u2019s eye and metaphysical poet\u2019s wit. In the lyrics, Mitchell is being manipulated, but she knows it and is complicit. \u2018No regrets, Coyote\u2019, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmelia\u201d is a paean to doomed aviator Amelia Earhart, the patron saint of solo voyagers. It\u2019s a death song about disappearance. \u2018In 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.\u2019 The song, full of light and air, may well be the most purely beautiful on the album, with Victor Feldman\u2019s soulful vibes and Larry Carlton\u2019s pointillist guitar harmonics as fine as the vapour trails at those icy altitudes: \u2018It was the hexagram of the heavens \/ It was the strings of my guitar\u2019. 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; \u2018life becomes a travelogue\u2019 with no exit; paradise is false; the roads are \u2018cursed and charmed\u2019; Icarus flies too high and plunges to his death; and, finally, she crashes into someone\u2019s 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: \u2018I dreamed of 747s \/ Over geometric farms \/ Dreams Amelia \u2013 dreams and false alarms\u2019. And what exactly are those \u2018false alarms\u2019? \u2018Basically, the false alarm was the end of a relationship,\u2019 she says. \u2018Two Scorpios couldn\u2019t let each other go. It was done, but we couldn\u2019t let go; we belonged to each other. It was winding down and I am driving solo without a driver\u2019s licence across the country. I think of Amelia. I think solo flight. I can\u2019t remember how many hotel rooms later it was complete.\u2019<\/p>\n
The title track is probably the most \u2018confessional\u2019 of all the songs. It\u2019s a breakup song, but there is no self pity or blame attached. It\u2019s an acceptance of, submission even, to her situation. A song filled with unanswered questions about love and work, belonging and freedom. The word \u2018hejira\u2019 is Arabic and refers to Mohammed\u2019s flight from Mecca. It roughly translates as \u2018running away, honourably\u2019. An internal defection.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> are addressed to someone but not the title track. On \u201cHejira\u201d 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\u2019s because the song is the most personal on the record.<\/p>\nAlong 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 \u201cSong for Sharon\u201d. 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\u2019s wife, the fashion model Phyllis Major, who killed herself in March 1976). The Sharon in the song is Mitchell\u2019s 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\u2019t always turn out the way we thought they would. \u201cSong for Sharon\u201d is my particular favourite on the album. It\u2019s pure poetry in song form and easily the equal of anything by Adrienne Rich or Sharon Olds.<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s closing track, \u201cRefuge of the Roads\u201d, was written about the three days that Mitchell spent with \u2018a friend of spirit\u2019, the controversial meditation master Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa at his Buddhist retreat in Boulder, Colorado. According to Mitchell, she fell into an \u2018awakened\u2019 state for three days, with no sense of self, no self-consciousness, a new experience for Mitchell and one she was eternally grateful for. \u2018I consider him one of my great teachers, even though I saw him only three times.\u2019<\/p>\n
On her previous album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns<\/em>, only one song \u2013 \u201cSweet Bird\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s moll Edith; the woman in \u201cDon\u2019t Interrupt the Sorrow\u201d standing up to patriarchy; the young southern belle in \u201cShades of Scarlet Conquering\u201d modelling herself on the image of Scarlett O\u2019Hara; the woman trapped in a failing marriage in \u201cHarry\u2019s House\/Centrepiece\u201d. All these beautiful, searing songs are very impressionistic. \u2018[On The Hissing of Summer Lawns<\/em>] I began to write social description as opposed to personal confession,\u2019 Michell said.<\/p>\nHejira<\/em>, however, returns her to her \u2018confessional\u2019 mode (Mitchell preferred the term \u2018penitence of spirit\u2019). 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<\/em> she is a Beat poet, writing about her lived experience on the road as it happened. \u2018The poet took over the singer,\u2019 she said in 1998. \u2018It\u2019s more like jazz melody, it\u2019s conversational improvisation.\u2019<\/p>\nThe characters she meets or talks about along the way \u2013 Coyote, Amelia Earhart, Walter \u2018Furry\u2019 Lewis, the \u2018strange\u2019 boy (who was actually one of her companions on the trip to Maine), Sharon Bell, Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Despite the \u2018femininity\u2019 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, \u2018I was girlie, \u201ctwee\u201d, 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.\u2019<\/p>\n
A couple of years ago, in anticipation of writing this essay, I posted a call out on social media asking for people\u2019s 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: \u2018My instinct is to say she resembles no others. But that\u2019s partly because I don\u2019t know enough names and opuses of US female poets to compare her to. She\u2019s 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.\u2019 This is as good a description as any I\u2019ve heard and it will do.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned before, I first became aware of Hejira<\/em> at around 15 when my older sister used to play it. Without my knowing, Joni Mitchell\u2019s 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 \u201cCoyote\u201d, \u201cAmelia\u201d, \u201cSong for Sharon\u201d and \u201cRefuge of the Roads\u201d that night. I don\u2019t remember any of those, but I do remember her playing her dulcimer.<\/p>\nTruth be told, I don\u2019t listen to Hejira<\/em> very often these days. I must have played that album a thousand times and I know every word. It\u2019s in my DNA. Emotionally speaking, it doesn\u2019t cut you a lot of slack. Like Pet Sounds<\/em> by The Beach Boys, For Emma, Forever Ago<\/em> by Bon Iver or Carrie & Lowell<\/em> by Sufjan Stevens, Hejira<\/em> cuts very close to the bone. One day, in my early 20s, I remember lying on grass at home and looking up, listening to \u201cAmelia\u201d on my Walkman. In that moment, I was transported to Joni picturing Amelia flying in the \u2018blue, blue sky\u2019. I didn\u2019t know then that this album would stay with me forever, but it has. For me, it\u2019s the blueprint for any artist\u2019s authenticity, integrity and creativity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nRichard Skinner is a novelist, poet and essayist. He has written a novel about Erik Satie, entitled The Velvet Gentleman<\/em> (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<\/em> magazine\u2019s \u2018Buried Treasure\u2019 column including pieces about Holger Czukay, Robert Palmer & Vangelis, among others. And for 3:AM magazine<\/em>, he has written longer pieces about Talking Heads & Mercury Rev.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The song, full of light and air, may well be the most purely beautiful on the album, with Victor Feldman\u2019s soulful vibes and Larry Carlton\u2019s pointillist guitar harmonics as fine as the vapour trails at those icy altitudes: \u2018It was the hexagram of the heavens \/ It was the strings of my guitar\u2019. 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; \u2018life becomes a travelogue\u2019 with no exit; paradise is false; the roads are \u2018cursed and charmed\u2019; Icarus flies too high and plunges to his death; and, finally, she crashes into someone\u2019s arms.<\/p>\n
By Richard Skinner<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117078"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117089,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117078\/revisions\/117089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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