Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

This one is a few weeks too late, but I’ve been meaning to post about an album that I was listening to obsessively for a few weeks straight, Hejira by Joni Mitchell, 1976. I first caught wind of this amazing album via Radio Paradise Mellow Mix which I listen to on a standalone wifi-based radio in my house, particularly via the tune Song for Sharon:

I thought this song was amazing, and when I read this comment on it, it piqued my interest to actually BUY THE CD!!!

For me, Hejira was one of the greatest work of art of the 20th century

Having listened to it a lot now, I think I would tend to agree. Someone else called it, paraphrasing, cinema for the ears. Utterly agree with that one. It’s one of the most lyrically complex albums I think I’ve ever heard, and the deeper I got into it, I was more and more surprised how little I’ve ever heard anybody talk about it. (I had to listen all the way through about 3-4 times before I really felt like I “got” it.) Plus, amazing Jaco Pastorius 70s melodic fretless bass… what else can I say?

The Wikipedia page on the album has tons of interesting morsels, some that are expressed in greater detail in songs on the album, others that provide good context and texture for the music. A sampling:

On her way back home, Mitchell met with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa in Colorado, an event she credited with curing her cocaine addiction and leaving her in a selfless “awakened state” that lasted three days.

During some of her solo journeys, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses, and told the varying strangers she met that her name was either “Charlene Latimer” or “Joan Black”. Despite the disguise, Mitchell was still sometimes recognized. She traveled without a driver’s licence and stayed behind truckers, relying on their habit of signaling when the police were ahead of them; consequently, she only drove in daylight hours. […]

Mitchell grew increasingly frustrated by the rock session musicians who had been hired to perform her music. “…There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried.” The session musicians in turn recommended that Mitchell start looking for jazz instrumentalists to perform on her records. In addition, her relationship with drummer John Guerin (which lasted through a significant portion of the mid-1970s) influenced her decision to move more towards experimental jazz music and further away from her folk and pop roots.

After recording the basic tracks that would become Hejira, Mitchell met bassist Jaco Pastorius and they formed an immediate musical connection; Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the “dead, distant bass sound” of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira and released the album on November 22, 1976. […]

The album title is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hijrah or Hegira, which means “departure or exodus”, usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina in 622. Mitchell later stated that when she chose the title, she was looking for a word that meant “running away with honor”. She found the word “hejira” while reading the dictionary, and was drawn to the “dangling j, like in Aja… it’s leaving the dream, no blame”. […]

Mitchell has described the album as “really inspired… there is this restless feeling throughout it… The sweet loneliness of solitary travel”, and has said that “I suppose 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.”

Anyway, just wanted to leave this signpost here for other musical adventurers to explore, or come back to. Here’s the opening track on the album, Coyote, which is probably more well-known than the one above.