Joni Mitchell

I was driving across the burning desert

When I spotted six jet planes

Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain

It was the hexagram of the heavens

It was the strings of my guitar

Amelia it was just a false alarm

It's a travel diary, “Hejira”, that risks being overlooked in its author's discography: because it's constantly shifting, mutable and disorienting, but also because its author is Joni Mitchell. One of the greatest North American songwriters, arriving here at her eighth album after having already delivered the landmark Blue, she recounts her life between '75 and '76, between a tour with Bob Dylan, a run of shows to promote the previous, complex and in some ways disorienting “The Hissing Of Summer Lawns” (1975), and a road trip with two friends from Los Angeles to Maine, followed by a solo drive back to California. It's a period in which she risks losing herself to cocaine, an addiction she would overcome thanks to an encounter with a Buddhist teacher during that very long solo drive home.

The rock musicians involved in “Court And Spark” (1974) and “The Hissing Of Summer Lawns” (1975) had stripped away some of the nuance from the singer's impalpable poetry, and this time she sets out to remedy that by turning to musicians with a jazz background. The turning point is her encounter with virtuoso bassist Jaco Pastorius, who proves capable of following the songwriter's lyrical wandering - she handles vocals and, this time especially, guitar - without ever overwhelming it: the music becomes part of the travel diary, more or less literal or allegorical, rounding out the imagery. The other musicians are nonetheless every bit as praiseworthy in the delicate way they adorn Mitchell's souvenirs.

The nine songs are less songs than compositions or “scenes”, linked by the overarching theme of travel: landscapes and animals, feelings and reflections, departures and returns. Rather than unfolding in a linear way, the tracks wander, following the direction of Mitchell's dense lyrics. The appearance of a coyote sparks the free-form jazzy folk of “Coyote”, a dreamlike hymn where observing the landscape becomes an occasion for memories and images, more or less connected. Mitchell speeds up into a rambling flow and, with astonishing naturalness, rediscovers lyricism, in an unstable fusion of speech and song, conversational and poetic at once. Even more refined is “Amelia”, with a gorgeously sweet guitar from Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman's vibraphone, and an enigmatic lyric: a lullaby that turns into a music box or folk tale depending on the moment, addressed to a listener in need of reassurance whom we can identify as Amelia Earhart, one of the great aviators of the early twentieth century; the “false alarm” that recurs in the lyric is at the heart of an imagined dialogue between Mitchell and a legendary, tragic figure who died in circumstances never fully explained, over the Pacific.

The journey continues with the amphibious “Furry Sings The Blues” - at the crossroads of folk blues and jazz - and the bittersweet dedication of “A Strange Boy”, an immature partner who makes her rediscover her own teenage self. The long “Hejira” takes its title, the same as the album's, from the exodus of Muhammad, together with the first Muslim faithful, from his native Mecca toward Yathrib. It's perhaps the track where Pastorius's contribution, and that of his fretless bass, is greatest - a second voice that digresses as much as, if not more than, Mitchell herself, in a lyric full of brief visions, reflections, and references.

Even longer, “Song For Sharon” unspools for almost nine minutes, with backing vocals and a more circular, regular structure: it's the track closest to Dylan's idiom, and it too plays out as a confrontation between two women, at odds over the subject of marriage. Only “Black Crow” gives in to a need for more rhythm and concision, before “Blue Motel Room” delivers the most calligraphic track on the album: it's hard to remain unmoved by that voice, but it's a bluesy postcard that doesn't match the elegant creativity of the album's finest moments. Closing things out is another folk-blues-jazz hybrid, “Refuge Of The Roads”, with an unexpected crescendo toward the end.

“Hejira” tells stories to get lost in, ones in which we glimpse the emotional complexity of Joni Mitchell and, by reflection, of ourselves. She brings this to us through narratives that are often free in form, ones that several talented musicians help develop in ways that aren't always linear. It lends itself to an existential reading, because it's an album to meditate on, return to, mull over, and it manages to offer some new shade of meaning every time. More than a travel diary, it's an excerpt from a diary of life: looking closely, though, the two are almost the same thing.

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11/04/2026