‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’: the first album Joni Mitchell said did justice to her songs
“I don’t think I proved myself to guys like Herbie Hancock until I did standards,” Joni Mitchell once said.
Just like any artist who built a reputation on going against the grain, Mitchell has always been a difficult one to put into words. We say words like “folk” or the kicker, “confessional”, thinking that’s enough to capture everything she achieved.
But that merely scratches the surface, if at all. Even focusing solely on Blue and Court and Spark feels fairly reductive sometimes. Because more than that, Mitchell is honest, not just in her songwriting and how she made her experiences poetic, but also in what she explored musically. And the ways she ignored the chatter around her when it tried to lead her astray.
But Mitchell’s complicated relationship with the industry wasn’t what drove her. In fact, she mainly stayed in her own bubble, writing “copiously”, as she once put it, to get all her thoughts down before turning them into a more familiar song structure that people will actually want to listen to. But beyond that, she never really saw herself as solely folk, with jazz making its way into her music more often than not, even if she didn’t see it that way herself.
She wasn’t criticised for doing it, of course. But she was regarded closely by her peers the moment she started adopting jazz elements with more purpose, as some of them thought it wasn’t her lane to begin with. When in reality, she knew a lot more about it than they realised at the time. When she started leaning more into it, like with Mingus, people had mixed reactions.
But before that, Mitchell had already given jazz her magic touch with The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Continuing the jazz seeds planted throughout Court and Spark, Summer Lawns bridged the gap between both versions of Mitchell with jazz groups and input from friends like James Taylor and Graham Nash. People didn’t know what to make of it at first, some hated it. But that’s also probably because they compared it to Court and Spark, not prepared for how much she would let her songwriting take a back seat in favour of something so openly jazz.
What’s more interesting to think about, though, is how all of this factors into how Mitchell actually sees herself. We love to use those pesky words – folk, confessional – but again, most of that seems neither here nor there when looking at everything she’s achieved. She’s honest, obviously, but even that means little when you think about how often the word itself is thrown around. And she talks a lot about her experiences as a woman in the industry, but that also feels overshadowed by her later comments on feminism, so it’s hard to call her that, either.
From her perspective, it’s actually fairly simple. Even if it does little to explain all else. Like, when she was asked how she sees herself, a folk or jazz singer, she said most of it exists “outside the laws” of jazz, or anything else for that matter. So maybe she truly is one who defies any description, and it’s down to the music itself to do the talking.
“I entered the game as a folk singer, but it took me six records to find a band that could play my music, and that was a jazz band and lots of my fans threw up their hands,” she told Mojo in 2008. “In truth, Mingus was the only jazz album I did. Everything else, while it may have sounded jazzy at times, is outside the laws of jazz.”
Going into more detail, specifically about which album she felt represented her best, she concluded, “With The Hissing of Summer Lawns, I cut my players some slack and they imposed some jazz chords on my music. Some people thought I was trying to do jazz and not quite getting it, but I wasn’t. The only thing I have in common with jazz is sometimes experimental rhythms, and these wide harmonies that are outside the rules of jazz.”
