Somewhere with your wings on time you must be laughing

Joni Mitchell stares off on some unnamed vista at the beginning of Hejira and observes of a coyote "We just come from such different sets of circumstance." Lucinda Williams, on her new album West, released in February, wonders "Is my love in Helena, eating sweet potato pies." Kim Gordon, on last year's Sonic Youth release Rather Ripped, found herself in earnest-love-song land when she said of her lover (presumably, husband/ guitarist/ fellow lead-singer Thurston Moore) "He's not a poet or a mystic with his cigarette unglued/ he's just neutral."

Kim Gordon, back in 1981 when Sonic Youth was at the forefront of groundbreaking, avant garde music, used to scream into the mirror with chilling ferocity, "Take off your dress! I'll shake off your flesh!" That she now observes with rosy eyes has to be a sign of the way artists change as they spend such a significant portion of their life making music - the truth is the interesting songs, the years of productivity come to a halt.

Or, in the case of great artists (as Mitchell and Williams and Sonic Youth are), they take the form of experimentation, of wandering, of albums that are incomplete at best. I have to mention Hejira, an album I can't stop listening to lately. There is so much wrong with Hejira - its rambling that borders on catatonia in dull moments. Made as a collaboration with bassist Jaco Pastorus, it's an album that rather slavishly builds itself as a road diary, a consternated travelogue.

It's not a huge leap for an artist like Mitchell, but the Mitchell you hear on Hejira is not the legendary Joni Mitchell. That legend of Joni Mitchell sings masterfully poetic, plaintive songs on guitar and piano, and she existed from whenever it was she got discovered (Clouds in 1969?) through Court and Spark in 1974. The Joni of The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Hejira (1976) is a different, less talked about Joni.

Much like the Sonic Youth that's now been making records for 12 years, since Washing Machine in 1995 bookended a ten year period of rock mastery that, from the underground up, helped shape rock music. Much like the Lucinda Williams who surfaced this year on West.

What I think is that all great artists climax at some point, finish their run of great records with a masterpiece that cannot be replicated, and break free, become something else entirely. You can see it in any artists catalogue - the great, world-changing Led Zeppelin up through Led Zeppelin IV and the pretty good rock band that continued afterwards. The Who lost to drug addiction and bad ideas after Who's Next. The poet laureate Bob Dylan who never reemerged after Blood On The Tracks.

People talk about transitions, or they at least see them. For Sonic Youth, perhaps they don't. I see their epic decade - the one that began with Bad Moon Rising in 1985 and Evol in 1986 as a selection of great beginnings, and ended with Washing Machine in 1995, an album, that seems, about endings, about fulfillment. When A Thousand Leaves was released in 1998, they were somthing else - you can hear it in the music, and in the album, which is, simply, less than the ones that preceded it.

Yet what I've noticed is how great this Sonic Youth can be. A Thousand Leaves was a fraction of the album that the 9 released in that previous decade were, but it opened up a sound of indie calm, plaintive, beautiful songs like "Snare, Girl" and "Hoarfrost" helped define the direction the band would take. Their albums this decade have been occasionally half-cooked, but also occasionally unnerving - the deeply unpopular 2000 release NYC Ghosts and Flowers remains to me one of the more ambitious takes on regret of any major artist I've heard. Since then, the drama is absent, but what's taken its place is a sense of ease and fun - Murray Street, Sonic Nurse, and Rather Ripped have digressions into the "he's not a poet or a mystic" land of pleasant nothingness, but they also have some masterpieces - "Unmade Bed," "Do You Believe In Rapture?" "I Love You Golden Blue," "The Empty Page," "Karen Revisited." These are songs made by stealthy artists making strong adult statements, and surprisingly, that adulthood looks good on the Youth.

Because that's what it is that separates one set of albums from the next - adulthood. Frankly it's less interesting when music's at stake. "Older" artists, after a while, set into a friendly, predictable mode of adult songs eventually. Lucinda Williams had been challenging this for a while - with World Without Tears in 2003, she made an adult record wreaking of hidden desires and lonely impulses more powerfully alert and honest than her previous, already perfect work. I think of World Without Tears as one of the few masterpieces of this decade, a record of poetic importance, an album that makes lines like "I have been so fucking alone" sound like the most primal of adult experiences.

West is an attempt in this vein, an album who wears its loneliness on its sleave - look at the titles: "Learning How To Live," "Unsuffer Me," "Rescue" and "Where Is My Love." It is, however, about half the experience of her previous attempt, and it hurts me to admit that for an artist of Williams track record. She's made, essentially, World With Less Tears, each song finding a better corollary here. "What If" a blander, misfiring imagistic version of "World Without Tears, "Unsuffer Me," though tonic, is less intoxicating than "Righteously" was. "West," beautiful album-capper it is, makes me think of the more vivid soul of "Fruits Of My Labor." Songs that aren't reminiscent of World Without Tears? Well, there's the blunt "Fancy Funeral," about not buying yourself a fancy funeral, or "Words," a song about Lucinda Williams love of writing. Both have lovely melodies. Both are nothing special.

Yet into this adulthood comes an old, wise Williams making one song of youthful questioning that sounds about as strong as anything she's ever made - its opener "Are You Alright" sounds, gruff smoke-voiced baritone aside, as if Williams could have written it 15 years ago. Except she couldn't have. The longing of its simple lines "Are you alright, haven't seen you in a real long time" is something only the weather of age can create.

That weather is what makes artists caterwauling into adulthood interesting. Joni Mitchell, in the past ten years, made recordings of her old songs in ways that make her sound like an entirely different person - a husky, deeply-bruised-by-cigarettes voice travels through the songs of Blue and For The Roses and Court and Spark on her records The Beginnings of Survival and Both Sides, Now, to mixed, mostly upsetting effect. But what they mostly do is point out the innate youthfulness of those records, showing Mitchell to be better at looking at life coming up, at anticipating and philosophizing.

Yet there were two records there after those masterpieces that showed an entirely different Mitchell. The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Hejira don't have the fans of those records. "In France They Kiss On Main Street," the song that opens Lawns, is so tuneless you'd think Mitchell hummed an idea in the car on the way to the studio and it got included on a record. Yet something is conceptually ablaze in this record, even though the entirety of it isn't. "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns," its images of contained femininity ("He bought her a diamond for her throat/ put her in a ranch house on the hill/ she could see the valley barbecues/ from her windowsill"), is an extraordinary, cutting piece of sociological observation, even amidst its Steely Dan synthesizers of 1975. Its penultimate song, "Sweet Bird," must be something Mitchell worked towards her whole career - few songs look back on life's choices with such sadness and awe, such fascination and confusion - "Sweet bird of time and change you must be laughing," she says of the bird that represents time, flying forever forward.

And Hejira? I haven't stopped listening to it, even if songs like "Black Crow" and "Furry Sings The Blues" are as forgettable as any coffee-house junk pile. This is the subdued Mitchell of the road. Her voice begins to crack here, in the great "Amelia," a song Mitchell described as "that song to Amelia Earhart, I was singing as one solo pilot to another." Sometimes she can't hit the notes anymore. Mitchell drove from coast to coast and put a photo of a road coming out of her chest on the cover. In a song like "Blue Motel Room," Mitchell focuses on the near-ending of her trip, imagines a lover back in LA while she's in Savannah and thinks "I've got road maps of a dozen states I've got coast to coast just to contemplate/ will you still love me."

You might have thought the answer was no - the music sleepy, with Jaco Pastorius's bass keeping the tone jazzy and light, ever eerie like clouds that won't rain. The album ends with "Refuge Of The Roads." In it, Mitchell creates her own travelogue, her own solo pilot journey - trips from California, fishnets on the Gulf of Mexico, Spring along the ditches. As the song nears its end, she spots on a service station calendar a photograph of the earth coming back from the moon: "And you couldn't see a city/ on that marble bowling ball/ or a forest or a highway/ or me here least of all/ You couldn't see these coldwater restrooms/ or this baggage overload/ westbound and rolling seeking refuge in the roads." That u in refuge may sound like the longest note in history when you hear it, and Mitchell sounds like she's young again when singing it - no cracks, no slip-ups, just a perfectly hit note trilling out along the highway, zooming to oblivion. To say that the moment is electrifying is obvious. To say that it is perfect takes the knowledge of something, an adulthood that calms, and fumbles around a bit.