TS: Joni Mitchell - 'Hissing of Summer Lawns' vs 'Hejira'

I'll defend Mingus, even though I haven't listened to it for over a year. It takes a few hundred listens to sink in, but from the first it's under your skin... I always found it quite unsettling, especially The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey. Apart from The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, which is hella fun.

I love Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, but it is a huge sprawl with uncomfortable pockets (I don't like side 3). But the title track is one of the most amazing things she's ever done, spinning endless circles. 'Cotton Avenue' is the Joni that Prince really cribbed from, and the 'Veils' ending is heartrending. 'Paprika Plains' is a grower, the way the orchestral arrangements sprout around what sounds like a completely improvised piano solo is very unique.

The original vinyl version of Don Juan had Sides 1 and 4 on one disc, Sides 2 and 3 on the other, and this made a lot of sense actually... Try programming the CD version 1-2-3-8-9-10 for the pop version of the album, with occasional recourse to track 4 for 'Paprika', but that's not a piece for casual listening.

'Mingus' is crazy messed up flawed. The glossy fuzak jazz arrangements just take over almost completely, but there are good things buried in there. That last track on side 1 with the wolves howling and Joni mercilessly thwacking her guitar is not normal music.

I like the late 70's music better than the early 70's stuff (though 'Blue' is wonderful). She was savaged for going jazz (people just not comfortable with the blackface Joni on the inner sleeve of Don Juan, with the word balloon saying 'Mooslems! Mooooslems, heh heh heh') but I think those are her best records.

the problem is that those things broke down really easy and often scratched up the records, so no one uses them anymore.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter is lengthy, but contains tons of fantastic material, and is one of my favorites. Mingus has some great moments, but overall the band sound is kind of slick and I dont really go back to it much. Travelogue to me is Joni's first real misstep. Many of the reinterpretations are less than compelling, and worst of all the string arrangements (just like the ones on Both Sides Now) are often lousy, going for a surprising amout of uncalled for overstatement. Since Joni has always had exquisite taste in arrangements and musicians, this really comes as a disappointment.

(must get m'self Hejira, haven't heard it in a fkn looong time)

'Court and Spark' is the commercial peak, it's very accomplished and I love 'Free Man In Paris', but the four albums that followed are a lot more interesting (to me). It's as if that album's huge success finally gave her the confidence to move forward.

The one song on Summer Lawns which I feel doesn't fit in is Sweet Bird, actually. The Jungle Line ties in with the bohemian, experimental, drunk-on-its-own-creativity mood which colours most of the album, but Sweet Bird is this weirdly misplaced conventional folk strum. In comparison to everything else on the album, it also has a piss-weak tune. Inspired by this thread, I'm listening to it again though... how fucking good is Harry's House/Centrepiece!

You 'n' me we're like America 'n' Russia
We're always keeping score
We're always balancing the power
And that can get to be a cold cold war
We gotta hold ourselves a peace talk
In some neutral cafe
You'll lay down your sneakin' round the town
And I'll lay down the highway

Oh, big big points for the Wolf That Lives In Lindsay.

Maybe Hejira has to take the cake. I'm simply unable to say a bad word about it. Always a contender for my favoruite album ever.

big big big points. I wish the last two minutes of that lasted for an hour.

why can i not find "hissing" in france?

'Hissing' is more colourful, and more adventurous, but for me it fails more. The songs have more red-bloodedness in them however, so it suits the cut n thrust of everyday life.

Who else could have done those albums one after the other?

i looked in g-j on st michel but no dice. i'll find it eventually.

If you dig the frosty angular accoustic strumming + the paco electric bass, I'd suggest you check out Pat Metheny's 1st lp 'Bright Size Life' (with Jaco on the bass)

Weird - listened to "A Song for Sharon" this morning. I don't know anyone who can write these melodies for these polysyllables, or have the inspiration to use high-pitched whoops for emphasis.

I love the way those lines build up to "Or me here least of all..."

It's amazing how many self-puncturing references the album has to Joni's own self-absorption.

on that topic, a pretty interesting background note on that song (and teh overall topic of self-absorption): http://jonimitchell.com/research/g_entry.cfm?id=16

That last paragraph from 'Refuge' I alread quoted ALWAYS slays me.

Fabulous.

In case someone is interested in hearing the Travelogue version

no, thanks. when she released travelogue for me she lost the last bit of credibility she had. what a syrupy piece of overproduced crap.

travelogue = killing your own babies.

I don't mind the version you've linked baaderonixx, but I don't know if that sort of treatment can do much for Hejira songs. Whereas I love the similar treatments of "Both Sides Now" and "A Case Of You" that she did previously.

or travelogue = flooding your kittens in strings.

I still have very mixed feelinsg re. Travelogue. Often I feel that it's very close to being brilliant, the nearly-noirish vibe, the husky late night voice ... but it kinda falls short and ends up being, yes, sirupy and "grown up".

wtf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kins8_pA9M4

well that was random.

he pretty much follows the original arrangement.

She does that, though, she gets you used to being uncomfortable, to the point of gaining a taste for it. The first time I played myself her Mingus album, the group chorus on 'boogeyman' was so howlingly contrived I felt myself trying to draw a line, "no no no, this is objectively bad, I musn't follow her here..." A day later, sure enough, the verse melody had hooked itself in my head... listening to these records can be complicated.

i find some of lou reed's records to work in a similar fashion

otm

loving this part lately

I pulled off into a forest
Crickets clicking in the ferns
Like a wheel of fortune
I heard my fate turn turn turn
And I went running down a white sand road
I was running like a white-assed deer
Running to lose the blues

travelogue = killing your own babies.

― alex in mainhattan, Thursday, November 13, 2008 8:59 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

Listen again it's actually awesome

poppy poison
poppy tourniquet
it sliiiithers away on brass like

mouth

piece

spit

^^^ next level rhymes

i've been listening to Hejira a lot, lately, and when it finishes or half-way through i think about listening to HOSL, but my copy's far away, and now Hejira is starting to sound to me like the desire to listen to HOSL.

this thread is such a delight.

I'll defend Mingus, even though I haven't listened to it for over a year. It takes a few hundred listens to sink in, but from the first it's under your skin... I always found it quite unsettling, especially The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey. Apart from The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, which is hella fun.

― The Lex (The Lex), Friday, August 1, 2003 2:35 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

it takes a few hundred listens to sink in! <3

this was a good thread!

i keep venturing tentatively into 80s and 90s joni, then retreat. why? it's not like the albums are that bad, just kind of hit and miss.

I feel a Joni period coming my way. Good weather and mild depression always put me in the mood for Hejira & Hissing

I've spent all day listening to Hejira -- and I have to say, I absolutely love that it's pretty much 90% guitars and fretless bass sloshing around with her singing these free flowing melodies over the top which perfectly complement the road theme. Notwithstanding "Blue Motel Room," these songs almost entirely feel of a piece. Only "Shades of Scarlet Conquering" has really captivated me from HOSL by comparison, but I'm willing to give it time.

Interesting how no one has mentioned Shadows and Light -- the live record from this era that features Metheny, Jaco, Don Alias and Michael Brecker, I believe. Is it just that her live performances coudn't match the atmosphere of the originals?

remember watching the video version of shadows and light that showed up on cable a lot when i was a kid. really dug it tho i didn't know anything about joni at the time

Interesting how no one has mentioned Shadows and Light -- the live record from this era that features Metheny, Jaco, Don Alias and Michael Brecker, I believe. Is it just that her live performances coudn't match the atmosphere of the originals?

― Naive Teen Idol, Thursday, 31 January 2013 4:20 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This, I think. There's very few stylistic variations on Shadows and Light that I think actually improve the originals.

In general I tend to think that Joni is a much better arranger than improviser, and her efforts to recreate the spontaneity of live jazz don't really win me over (one reason why I find HOSL much better than DJRD). The pristine perfectionism of HOSL and Hejira gets lost a bit on Shadows and Light, I find.

shadows and light to me sounds more like a fusion record, the essence of joni watered down. hejira is an album with a very strong flow which shadow and light obviously isn't as there is a mix of songs from different albums on it. miles of aisles is her best live album i think but that was before hejira. i really like her banter and intros to the songs on that one.

Hejira is def the way I'm getting into Joni as performer after long being a fan of her as songwriter

I spent a lot of this weekend listening to Shadows and Light in the car...and it's started to win me over. The bass n' brushes version of "The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines" in particular is less over-produced than the Mingus version and just as lithe.

In fairness, a big piece of my enjoyment of this is that I'm a Metheny fan -- and Shadows and Light is kind of a dream lineup in some ways (Joni, Metheny, Mays, Jaco, Don Alias, and Michael Brecker). When Metheny breaks out a typically billowy solo on "In France..." it just feels natural. There are moments on this record that just ebb back and forth between Joni's schtick (which admittedly isn't that different than her studio versions) and something off of Metheny's live Travels album.

If anything, it's a little disappointing there isn't more of Metheny on this (Brecker is the dominant soloist, which isn't altogether a bad thing). He only has a handful of solos (tho he has one cut all to himself) and Mays is mixed down really low. More of Metheny accompanying Joni on the Hejira material in particular (which itself sounded like a first- or second-cousin of his debut w Jaco, Bright-Sized Life) would have been interesting to hear. Part of me wonders if he was holding back a bit given that he wasn't the star Joni was in 1979 (tho in jazz and pop circles, he pretty much would be just two years later).

been obsessed (again) w/ "boho dance" lately. seems like the kind of song that would just be flattened by a politically-correct hot take (just like a lot of "hissing"), since the worldviews the song explores are not really there to be accepted or dismissed, since what the song best expresses is ambivalence--both that of the narrator and the (male?) hipster she's describing. the delicacy with which joni describes those worldviews is rather astonishing, isn't it? also the way the distinction between the worldviews is explored through subtly gendered metaphors ("The cleaner's press was in my jeans/And any eye for detail/Caught a little lace along the seams"). later the clothing metaphor is inverted to suggest the opposite ("A camera pans the cocktail hour/Behind a blind of potted palms/And finds a lady in a Paris dress/With runs in her nylons"). in other words, she doesn't belong completely in either milieu. this concludes with the "stricken from your uniform" and "not mine, these glamour gowns" phrases.

also, "another hard-time band/with negro affectations" is basically blueshammer, right?

also if you ever want to be reminded what an extraordinary arranger joni was, listen to the demo of "boho dance" (on the "seeding of summer lawns" boot) and compare it to the finish product. it was always a great song, but the full arrangement contributes so much, adds greatly to the sense of wistful ambivalence.

one last thought -- joni mitchell and paul simon seem to be the two late-60s singer-songwriters who quickly outgrew the folk template of their earlier work and sought out, above all, new textural and rhythmic influences. joni wasn't as determinedly eclectic as simon, but i think it's fair to say that her rhythmic sense is even more sophisticated.

I've been carrying the studio version of this tune in my phone for a few weeks. I love this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6d2RG2Rl64