On an overnight, about Joni Mitchell's
Hejira, a flawed album that, it turns out, would be the most important one I've bought this year. I called it "Story Of A Song," because at one point it was just going to be about "Refuge of The Roads," that album's final song, but you can't tell that story without telling all the others. So, no title.
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Story Of A Song: “Refuge Of The Roads” Joni Mitchell
Something is off about Joni Mitchell’s voice for the first 8 songs of Hejira. It’s been getting progressively deeper in every album after her last “Hippie” period release Ladies From The Canyon. Perhaps it reached its zenith in 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns the previous year, when it was deeper than in previous records, but still a pitch-perfect Soprano act of flawlessness. Hejira is only a year newer, but the voice is now scattershot and, in its way, lucky – it hits notes correctly as if by serendipity. As “Coyote” opens, Joni reaches one high note – “There’s no comprehending/ just how close to the skin bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get/ and still feel so alone.” That “alone” is heavenly in a sense, but it’s also its own accident, appealing in its humanity, not in the sonorous ease of her voice up to this point.
It just gets worse from there, and I’m saying that as a fan of Hejira – “Amelia,” lyrically poignant and evocative as it is, is, up to this point in her career, the worst vocal performance she’s ever recorded. The smoke has taken hold – her notes are faltering, and though her voice is magnificent compared to where it would wind up some 15 years later at the dawn of the 90’s, it’s not what it was. But that’s appropriate – this Joni is not who she was. Hejira will not be a particularly successful record commercially, and it isn’t even entirely successful in intent, but something does work about it, and that starts with the flaws in the voice.
From its journey-as-spiritual-myth title (its origin is as a Muslim word meaning a journey away from danger) to its dated, literal cover image of a road arising from Mitchell’s torso, Hejira is (to quote Mitchell’s own description of Summer Lawns) “a concept from start to finish.” That sort of thing is a bonus, of course, but it’s also a limitation – Hejira, each song its own landmark and quizzical document of wanderlust, is so set on being the Joni Mitchell travel itinerary document, the road becomes a little suffocating, or at least, bordering on embarrassing. With “Coyote” contrasting with a coyote, “Black Crow” identifying with the crow, “Amelia” inspired by the vapor trails of passing jets, “Song For Sharon” by a wedding dress in a Staten Island storefront display, and even “Refuge Of The Road’s” final, magnificent verse begun by viewing a calendar in a highway service station, Mitchell risks psuedointellectual overidentifying – you wonder when she’ll pass a fire hydrant and write a deeply personal song about high water pressure.
Musically, Hejira is Mitchell’s first record with bassist Jaco Pastorius, and it’s also sonically the most distinctive of their sound together. His bass sounds steely and low, a rumbling from the soul stirred by the passing lines on the freeway. The notion of travel, of deep contemplation gets locked into that sound, the thick stringed sound of thoughts weighing the conscious. In “Hejira,” Mitchell sings “There’s comfort in melancholy/ when there’s no need to explain,” and Pastorius’s troubled bass is the sonic embodiment of that notion. His movement in each song is so unique, his guitar is the uniting thread that makes the concept such a potent force, allowing Hejira to form its indelible, imperfect impression as a whole. Mitchell’s description of Summer Lawns might have been that “This record is a concept, from start to finish,” but she always felt like she was straining at selling that song to song. Hejira needs no such disclaimer – it has Pastorius instead.
What was Mitchell thinking with Hejira, I wonder sometimes. Some years after Court and Spark’s release, she described that record as a “dialogue” of identity vs. love in the modern era, and the truth was that was far too cerebral for the effortlessness of that record. It was true, of course, but it was also unnecessary, a step backwards into the irrelevant land of explanation. Great records need no capitulation of their success as a complete work. Hejira needs some explanation – more than Court and Spark and For The Roses, less than The Hissing of Summer Lawns (and, depending on your view, more or less than every subsequent record – no explanation can justify Wild Things Run Fast or Chalk Marks In a Storm).
The central song of what it embodies has to be, appropriately, the title track. Track 5 of 9 makes it literally central, but it’s also built up to and deflated from afterwards – and that’s because it is, honestly, not really a song, but an idea. The central motif of the guitar is repeated over and over again, itself a “prisoner of the white lines on the freeway” (the central refrain of “Coyote,”). “I’m driving in some vehicle, I’m sitting in some café,” is the lyric opening the song, and it speaks to the endlessness of the road sinking in. “I’m porous with travel fever,” she sings, passionately, and who wouldn’t be at this point in the album? She’s danced with coyotes, stared off at planes and thought of being swallowed by the sky or the sea, wandered around Beal Street, and observed with skeptical removal a strange boy skating the streets of his home. Those two previous songs, “Furry Sings The Blues” and “A Strange Boy,” are not particularly memorable, but they are consistent – the same thread of travel of Pastorius’s guitar defines them, like a pencil tracking progress on a map. “Hejira,” so contemplative and passionately felt, is the climax of the wanderlust, a breakthrough in sameness. It ends the first side of the record, and the four songs on side 2 are far more specific in their goals – weddings, crows, blue motel rooms, etc.
A song like “Hejira” is soft, sure, a repetitive, comforting guitar progression, but what’s far more important is the collision of themes and ideas coming, in their way, to the forefront – perhaps not simply on Hejira, but in Mitchell’s career. That vehicle she’s traveling and that café she sits in are the stage, but they’re only the beginning of this evocative setting – a melancholy so comforting it’s described as “as natural as the weather/ in this moody sky today.” I hear that line, that personification of a sky as moody, as the proverbial punch on the back of the ketchup bottle – everything comes out afterwards. Porous with travel fever and climaxing the wanderlust, it also seems to unleash, there beneath the surface, all that Mitchell’s been uncertain of saying about life.
She observes, “A man and a woman sitting on a rock – they’re either gonna thaw or freeze.” I think that image is the nature of this hejira, the nature of the spirit awash in indefinable possibility. All Mitchell says is “Strains of Benny Goodman coming through the snow and pinewood trees” as a delicate saxophone insertion seems to trail you off away from that rock. All there are, truly, are possibilities, Mitchell seems to tell us – “we call come and go unknown/ each so deep and superficial/ between the forceps and the stone.” This is, truly, Mitchell’s most clearly stated positions on life, the fear of being unknown amongst her choices when death (the stone) arrives. One verse, I think, lays the argument bare, while also laying the path for endless, spooky existential rumination:
"Well I looked at the granite markers/ Those tribute to finality - to eternity/ And then I looked at myself here/ Chicken scratching for my immortality/ In the church they light the candles/ And the wax rolls down like tears/ There's the hope and the hopelessness/ I've witnessed thirty years/ We're only particles of change I know, I know/ Orbiting around the sun/ But how can I have that point of view/ When I'm always bound and tied to someone/ White flags of winter chimneys/ Waving truce against the moon/ In the mirrors of a modern bank/ From the window of a hotel room"
Mitchell registers only surrender in the world around her, the waving of truce against the moon, and she, to counter, has chosen to travel in some vehicle and sit in some café, and “chicken scratch” for immortality – which is to say, to write her experience and fight the endless white flags she sees in the world waving truce. The image is at once a work of argument and a work of calm beauty – there is a comfort in that world too, but Mitchell prefers her path, that path of being “a defector of the petty wars.”
In the year I bought Hejira, I was 25 – or, I should say, I bought Hejira this year. I’m 25 now. What is it in a 25-year-old, a year in which adulthood can no longer be ignored. I wrote about my 24th year as the year in which old assumptions are thrown out, when the short term groups of time concluded and restarted by the structure of school years are no longer, and so the only real conclusion is death, and the meantime becomes tougher, more abstract, more unfamiliar. I had moved that year across the country to Seattle, perhaps for no real definable reason. What is a definable reason anyway – all it would truly be was a socially acceptable salve for the wound of personal longing, of too many nights sleeping on “the strange pillows of my wanderlust.” Of feeling that I, too, could be a defector of a petty war.
Maybe it was the year. Maybe it was the month – February. February is lonely for the single, and, as would follow, lonely for the lonely. Mitchell said of “Amelia” that it was a song she wrote “from one solo pilot to another.” It would make sense that it would take a solo pilot to identify with the record as well. Maybe it was the city, the rain. “Here in Savannah it’s pouring rain,” Mitchell sings evocatively on “Blue Motel Room.” You can see her in blue motel rooms writing lyrics, staring at “slick like cellophane” treetops from the storms. You can hear it from within those same windows wondering at the rest of the world, an imaginary “you” to still love you when you come back home, wherever that is. In any case, I can hear the crescendo of “Hejira”’s guitar in times of formless consternation, times in which certainties are vague and inaccurate – driving in some vehicle, sitting in some café. You are somewhere – “You know it’s never been easy/ whether you do or do not resign/ whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ or stick to some straighter line.”
A song like “Hejira” is the way not to resign. Perhaps to understand it is, too.
Side two bounces to the breadth of extremities. “Song For Sharon” is an 8-minute poetic evocation of marriage and personal choices. “I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,” the song opens simply. Sharon is married with a husband and a family, and sings to them. Her choices are the “other road” Mitchell could have taken, and she sees their appeal in her past – she talks of chasing boys on ice skating rinks and says “It was white lace I was chasing.” She’s fascinated by every choice – “A woman I know just drowned herself/ the well was deep and muddy/ she was just shaking off futility/ or punishing somebody/ my friends were calling me up all day yesterday/ all emotions and abstractions/ it seems we all live so close to that line/ and so far from satisfaction.”
If I am criticizing Mitchell’s evidently wearing voice, let me affirm the extraordinary quality of her verse. To read that stanza is to puzzle yourself at “that line” far from satisfaction, and to honor that sense of confusion, to feel it manifest. “Song For Sharon” is such a standout track because the length of thought of marriages and choices is given room for implication, room for expansion. It’s what the second side does without realizing – expand.
Of that, there’s a relief in “Blue Motel Room,” a more classic jazz song, and a punchy burst of humor. The song’s title is literal and punchy – “I’ve got a blue motel room, with a blue bedspread/ I’ve got the blues inside and outside my head.” It doesn’t work very hard at it – which is a compliment – but the song is the moment of accepting all the wandering of the record. Its final verse is a joke, but a giddy one: “You and me, we’re like America and Russia/ always keeping score… gonna have to have ourselves a peace talk/ in some neutral café.” Its singability and standup bass leaves you happy and warm, but it can only do it with the compounding feeling of identity in motion that the record conjures. And it lightens the load a bit for the song that sums up everything, one of Mitchell’s finest songs ever, “Refuge of the Roads.”
“Refuge of the Roads” is the synopsis of all of Joni Mitchell’s attempts on Hejira. In it, her economy of phrase becomes essential - she describes meeting a “friend of spirit” and says in speaking with him that he “mirrored me back simplified,” that they “laughed how our perfection would always be denied.” Such an understanding of life, such an evocation of meeting a person with whom your thoughts can share space and understanding. Yet she rejects it, always the solo pilot – “Hard of humor and humility, he said we’ll lighten up your heavy load/ I left him there for the refuge of the road.”
I mentioned in the beginning of this essay that something is off about Mitchell for the first 8 songs of Hejira. “Refuge of the Roads” is track 9. Her voice has found a home finally, and it’s in the peace of the roads – the acceptance of the way in which perfection will always be denied. In its way, “Refuge of the Roads” is a song like “Tangled Up In Blue,” a work of timeframe and experience following one magnificent vignette after another, each one concluding with that same idea of taking refuge in the movement and vastness of experience that is travel. Of that, the verses get more and more elated. In its penultimate sketch, Mitchell pulls off into a forest: “And I went running through the forest/ I was running like a white ass deer/ running to lose the blues/ to the innocence in here.” She says of this stop “Like a wheel of fortune/ I heard my fate turn turn turn.”
To say that Mitchell has found enlightenment, or at least perspective on her road trip becomes an understatement. The album’s final verse is a mind-opener:
“On a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken 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 this cold water restroom
Or this baggage overload
West bound and rolling
Seeking refuge in the roads.”
There’s so much striking me in that final verse. That marble bowling ball. This baggage overload. Even the words “over the month of june” as opposed to “on a calendar.” It’s mostly, though, finding hope and elation in a sense of insignificance, in marking the specificity of an individual experience despite the grand anonymity of it all, of beginning to understand the vastness of it all. In it, the final refrain is enormous – the “u” in refuge is held for two to three times as long as in previous refrains, allowing the guitar and drums to crescendo louder as well, creating the sense of riding, speeding towards the sunset.
To me, the greatest albums match me philosophically – they’re albums that see the world for what it is and are excited by it despite the “complications.” Tom Waits’s Bone Machine is like that – journeying through hell to register that “You must risk something that matters.” PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea as well – an album beginning with “This world’s crazy/ give me the gun” and concluding with “Now we’ll float, take life as it comes.” Mitchell’s own masterpiece (in my opinion) For The Roses is similarly conclusive on its search for identity. There isn’t brutality on Hejira, but there is enough angst and confusion to fill albums with twice its length and half its flaws. To conclude with “Refuge Of the Roads” is to find hope somewhere in the interior of America, which is to make peace of getting close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips and still feeling so alone. There’s refuge in life, it turns out.
