Joni Mitchell - Hejira

Joni Mitchell’s eighth studio album, Hejira, is one of the defining records of her mid-1970s transformation: a remarkable meeting of poetic songwriting, adventurous guitar work and jazz-influenced arrangements. The album sits roughly in the middle of her esteemed discography, and is intriguing as one of her biggest progressive and creative leaps. The album followed a sensational four-year run, with the lauded and commercially successful Blue (her last for Reprise before joining David Geffen’s Asylum), For the Roses, Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. The latter two albums had certainly seen Mitchell moving further into jazz and less conventional song structures (she would go further to collaborate with Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock by the end of the decade), but she was never especially interested in repeating a successful formula. It’s not just the track-to-track on Hejira, the whole album feels completely unbounded by any pop-song structure or framework. It has such a lightness.

At the risk of sounding kind of hackneyed, Hejira has a real sense of motion to it. The writing of the album was written for the best part as Mitchell travelled across America (apparently in her much-loved white Mercedes-Benz) after the end of a relationship and also a month as part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Those journeys gave her distance from her everyday life and provided the settings, characters and ideas that populate the songs. Talking about Rolling Thunder, there is an amazing section in Martin Scorsese’s documentary film, where Joni just rips through her ‘Coyote’ (all the more immense as it was unreleased at that point) at Gordon Lightfoot's house, with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn watching on and trying to add some sort of embellishment. They end up just watching her, she’s untouchable and it’s a glorious performance.

Coyote, the album opener, is just astonishing. Full of love, venom and melancholy, all at a pace that veers between complex and breezy, it is a beautiful song. Amelia and Song for Sharon also explore independence, and carry that same spirit of pensive self-examination. The performances across the album are all exemplary, with Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass providing such a characterful wooze, and guitarist Larry Carlton and drummer John Guerin are immaculate at framing Joni, intricately placed right in the middle of the mix.

Without wholesale ditching her intimate, observational writing, Hejira’s enduring appeal is in that it follows its own expansive instincts. It is full of neurosis and contradictions, honest and totally fearless. Fifty years on, it remains a striking example of an artist following her own instincts rather than returning to a proven commercial formula. 

You can hear this beautiful album live alongside other Joni Mitchell classics this November at the Brighton Dome.