Colman Andrews, Phonograph Record, December 1976
Very few of Joni Mitchell’s songs since the Ladies of the Canyon LP have been recorded by other artists, and I suppose that must be because with every passing album her work has grown increasingly personal while showing her own sensibility more fiercely and unequivocally. It is very difficult to imagine anyone else singing most of the songs on For The Roses, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns or even, for that matter, Blue. Or on this new album.
Mitchell’s songs and Mitchell’s singing seem so close together, and she herself so close to both, that it is almost as if – to paraphrase what someone once said of Van Morrison (in the days of Astral Weeks) – she were simply standing up in front of a microphone and spilling her soul. She almost seems to be making the words up as she goes along — ad-libbing her funny, asymmetrical, sometimes heart-rending poetry, fashioning her phrases (alternately Byzantine and blunt) with brilliant care and casual, almost flippant elegance.
Hejira is something of a theme album, though the theme involved doesn’t take one as thrillingly (and terribly) by the throat as did the theme of Summer Lawns. It might be said, in fact, that Hejira succeeds in spite of its thematic unity and not necessarily because of it.
The theme, of course, is travel – moving, running, changing places. Flight, in several senses of the word. Rigs that pass in the night. Fortunately, the ‘free, free way’ and its many relations (I started counting references to travel and uses of the word ‘road’ in the lyrics, but I had to go somewhere so I lost track) are used on many levels, and the metaphors are rich and deep enough so that neither ‘touring’s such a drag’ nor ‘you can’t run away from yourself’ ever rear their boring little heads. (Hejira seems an ironic title, by the way, since at the end of a hejira there is presumably a Mecca, and no such haven is in sight here – the stances of ‘Refuge of the Roads’ notwithstanding.)
The music on Hejira, as usual with Mitchell, feels a lot like calypso (with the exception of ‘Blue Motel Room’ and maybe ‘A Strange Boy’), both in the lilt of the rhythm section and in Mitchell’s own concept of phrasing – the way she makes words fit into patches of time. (There is also merest taunting of a reggae beat on one track.) Musically, certainly, much of Hejira will sound familiar. The artist creates his or her own clichés but can get away with it when they are this deliberate and this obviously the artist’s own.
Mitchell’s songwriting is as good as ever. Her almost accidental eroticism in lines like ‘He picks up my scent on his fingers/While he’s watching the waitresses’ legs’ or ‘And I went running down a white sand road/I was running like a white-assed deer’ or ‘Still sometimes the slightest touch of a stranger/Can set up trembling in my bones’ is most efficient. At other times, the tristful precision of her descriptive phrases recalls no less a master of that mode than Philip Larkin.
More important even than Mitchell’s words, though, is the way she sings what she writes, the way she binds her words to her music. Her manner of shaping phrases is daringly histrionic at times, daringly plain at other times. Her voice knows when to soar and when to grumble, when to waver and when to hold firm. Listen to a song of hers two dozen times, with a good ear and a good voice, and it will still be nearly impossible to match her risings and fallings the twenty-fifth time through. Both her tonal and her dramatic modulations are quite stunning, quite unexpected. She has the eerie ability to make the most incidental audience not only listen to a phrase but care about listening to it. Her readings of short pieces of song like ‘no regrets, Coyote’ (the first time), ‘the next thing I know’, ‘eighteen bucks went up in smoke’, ‘honey, tell ’em you got germs’, ‘or me here least of all’ and even just the second syllable of the word ‘lover’ in ‘Song for Sharon’ are nearly impossible to forget.
When she sings ‘Amelia, it was just a false alarm’, she captures a feeling of tired longing that a generation of neo-folkies, many of them extremely talented, have been trying, and failing, to reproduce in a few words for years. And when she curls into her jazz voice on ‘Blue Motel Room’, she is fire through smoky glass, as good as Helen Humes.
A digression: One distrusted Mitchell as a jazz singer when she tried ‘Twisted’ on Court and Spark, but the distrust disappeared when she did ‘Centerpiece’ on Summer Lawns. ‘Motel Room’ is so good, and so unusually but genuinely jazz, that one almost wishes Mitchell would, as a one-time thing, try a pure, straight jazz album, with other people’s compositions and with pure, straight jazz musicians of the sort who had their cabaret cards before Tom Scott was even born. Mitchell has an obvious love for the King Pleasure/Eddie Jefferson/Annie Ross/Jon Hendricks axis and she could also have fun with things like ‘720 in the Books’, ‘I’ve Got Your Number’, or ‘Sunday in Savannah’ but she could also probably do chillingly successful things with serious songs like ‘Lush Life’, ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’, or ‘Some Other Time’ …
Some of Mitchell’s usual backup musicians are present on Hejira, including Max Bennett, John Guerin, Victor Feldman, Tom Scott and Bobbye Hall; they are as firm as ever. Abe Most on clarinet, Chuck Domenico on bass and Neil Young on harmonica (!) guest-star on one track each. But the most impressive player here is Jaco Pastorius (of Weather Report and Al DiMeola’s group) on four tracks. His cool, lanky lines on the title song sometimes match Mitchell’s own with unerringly accurate inflections, and on ‘Refuge of the Roads’ his bass is a finely lyrical lead instrument. Larry Carlton’s guitar is also a delight, especially on ‘A Strange Boy’, where his strong, intelligent obbligati are reminiscent of Ollie Halsall.
There can be no doubt that Joni Mitchell is a major artist, as both writer and performer – one who seems already mature but still willing to mature further, to polish her considerable talents without wearing them away. Long may she run.