‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’: The mysterious Joni Mitchell album she refuses to unravel
Sometimes, Joni Mitchell writes boldly and brazenly. Her innermost thoughts and feelings spill into her words as she considers the climate in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and contends with all-consuming love in ‘A Case of You’. Even amidst her poetic phrasing, it’s easy to pinpoint emotions and meaning, to allow yourself to feel what she feels. At other times, her songwriting is a little more veiled.
Other times, she forgoes bold declarations of feeling and observation in favour of intricate stories and indecipherable detail. Her vulnerability never wanes, but it becomes concealed under layers of poetry and narrative, urging you to afford her a little more attention. As musically mysterious as it is lyrically elaborate, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is one example of this.
Released in 1975, the record marked Mitchell’s seventh studio offering and demonstrated her changing sonic interests. As she began to play with new genres and looked outwards with her songwriting, her music became infused with a sense of mystery.
While Mitchell’s more widely loved albums, the likes of Blue and Court and Spark, are fairly forthcoming in their tales of love and loss, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a little more elusive. This sense of mystery stemmed from the album’s conception. “This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally – as a whole,” Mitchell explained in an interview on her website, “The whole unfolded like a mystery.”
Mitchell’s description of the album as “a whole”, while a little vague, makes perfect sense with just one listen. It’s beautifully coherent, inviting you to join Mitchell in the summer lawns for 40 minutes or so, but it’s also just as mysterious as the way in which it unfolded.
The album finds Mitchell still in the early days of her jazz and electronic leanings, playing with saxophones and Moog synths, working them into her established folk sound. In this way, the music maintains a sense of mystery. It’s not quite a straightforward folk, but it’s not full-blown jazz, either. It’s arty and unpredictable and a little experimental without ever diverting from the whole.
Lyrically, too, the album has a sense of mystery. It’s detailed and driven by story, following Mitchell downtown and under the neon signs into tales of cinematic lovers and French kisses. As she leads us into the darkness, she drops in names and places with ease, which somehow seems to walk the line between specificity and mystery.
Throughout the record, her lyrics contain depth and detail, poetry and power, but they never give too much away. She charts the suburbs and the dancehalls with a sense of mysticism, inviting you to study what might lie beneath – tales of womanhood and life in the city. If you’re hoping for Mitchell to reveal any more about those mysteries, you might be out of luck.
“It is not my intention to unravel that mystery for anyone,” Mitchell said of the record, “but rather to offer some additional clues…” Luckily, the record is far better enjoyed with that sense of vagueness and subjectivity. The Hissing of Summer Lawns doesn’t solve the mystery for you, it invites you in to solve it yourself.
Amidst gorgeous moments of jazz and densely descriptive yet elusive storytelling, Mitchell delivered yet another masterclass in songwriting. It may remain a mystery to most – perhaps even to Mitchell herself – but that’s the beauty of it.
Revisit The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the Joni Mitchell masterpiece she calls “a mystery,” below.
