The 1976 album Joni Mitchell knew no one else could make: “Really inspired”
Joni Mitchell wasn’t one to talk about her music like she was better than everyone else.
Every single artist has the right kind of muse guiding them on their journey, and she just happened to have something that was more idiosyncratic to her than nearly anyone else in the music industry. But even when making some of her best albums, she knew that she was breaking new ground in areas that no one else could have possibly imagined when she had the right musicians at her disposal.
Because sometimes the best songs that Mitchel ever wrote were normally about how she was feeding off of the other musicians in her band. Any great band effort didn’t need to have the most extravagant arrangements or anything, but when she listened to some of the greatest records by Charles Mingus or Miles Davis, she could tell that they were channelling something together that she wasn’t going to get playing her acoustic guitar by herself.
Blue was still a masterpiece in every sense of the word, but there was a lot more ground that Mitchell had to cover when she made her later records. She had always been a big fan of jazz, and even if the folk revolution co-opted her as one of their own when she first started making music, Hejira was one of the first times where she seemed to draw a firm line in the sand for what she wanted to be.
She had spent years with her acoustic in her hands, but she was far more interested in making different avenues for her stories. Bands like Weather Report were becoming some of the biggest names in fusion, and even if she didn’t get every musician from the band into her backing group, she knew that the LA Express had the right kind of world for her song to live in whenever she made a new record.
But Hejira exists somewhere beyond that kind of approach. Before working with Charles Minugs, this was about the closest she ever came to making a full-on jazz album, and with the help of people like Jaco Pastorius, she didn’t have to worry about falling back too much. She had a firm foundation for her tunes, and when she released the finished product, she knew that no one could have possibly competed with what she was making on tracks like ‘Amelia’ and ‘Coyote’.
These were intimate character portraits, and she would do anything she could to get the sound that she heard in her head as she did here, saying, “To me, the whole Hejira album was really inspired. I feel a lot of people could have written ‘Chelsea Morning’, but I don’t think anyone else could have written the songs on Hejira. I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself, and there is this restless feeling throughout it… The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”
And that’s not just someone trying to gloat, either. Mitchell felt that she had a particular standard that no one else in rock and roll had done before, and even if there were other legends that she could pick out in the wild, like Steely Dan, there was no way of replicating this kind of musical adventure in quite the same way if she had the traditional rock and roll construction everyone knew her for.
Becoming a jazzer was bound to be a risky move, and even if it lost her a lot of fans in the process, Mitchell wasn’t going to back down from what she had done. She was proud to be a real musician’s musician, and even if some people refused to accept that kind of approach, she was going to do everything that she could to make the kind of record that would last much longer than whatever run-of-the-mill musicians were making later down the line.
