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

These two women are so closely linked in my mind that they shall ne'er be separated.

evoke rooms with heavy curtains shielding them from the harsh mid afternoon California sun...

Nice one. That's what I really love about Joni's music. I need to check out Didion's stuff (I only read "Slouching..." so far)

i really like "the jungle line." i don't know about the title track.

i've been listening to a lot of joni lately. i'm venturing, tentatively, into her 80s and 90s stuff. i'm not sure what i think, yet.

Hejira: Coyote is sensational. Full of the specificity someone above said her post-Blue work lacked (as is Song for Sharon, and Furry). Amelia is one of the prettiest songs she wrote. The whole Jaco emphasis and the thematic consistency make it stand out and give it heft. "Blue Motel Room" > "Centerpiece" as the obligatory faux-jazz blues song. Except for Refuge of the Roads, the lesser songs all have something musically or lyrically to recommend them. The album cover art is 50 times better than the cheesy Hissing cover. Hejira really defined Mitchell's deepening interest in jazz and non-linear forms; it is the critical hinge between her classic period and the rest of her career; it is her Blood on the Tracks.
It just isn't any contest.

Also, Amazon tells us that Hejira is more popular today than Hissing. It tells us that Blue is the most popular of Mitchells original albums, followed by a close grouping of Hejira, Court, and Ladies, all of which have ranks within about 800 places of each other (around #2000). Hissing is next, but is ranked in the 8,000s overall. Obviously a cheap argument, but in this case the public is right.

I love the most decadent-sounding tracks best, and the way they're married to lyrics of stasis and boredom - the title track and 'Harry's House/Centrepiece'.

To illustrate, I think the following, sung over loops of African drumming with occasional throaty yells, is a somewhat embarassingly Heart of Darkness in its association of Africa with The Primal, The Lawless, The Primitive, etc., in contrast to repressed Civilized white people in New York:

The jungle line, the jungle line
Screaming in a ritual of sound and time
Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind
And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in
Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke
Coy and bitchy, wild and fine
And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats
Charging, chanting down the jungle line

Which is not to say I don't respond to it (as I do to Conrad, or to Riefenstahl), or that I don't think it's a pretty good, subtle lyric, especially in the parallels it draws between Henri Rousseau's painting and jazz and (implicitly) Mitchell's own music. And the drumming is very cool, and this was to my knowledge the first significant use of a looped sample in pop music. When it came out, this was my favorite song on Hissing, for sure, although even then I thought it went a couple of clicks beyond good taste. My reference to Riefenstahl above is pertinent; when Hissing first appeared, the exhibition and then publication of Leni Riefenstahl's The People of Kau had made a huge splash and provoked a lot of debate about the representation of Africans in Western art. Whether or not Mitchell was consciously influenced by Riefenstahl when she did "Jungle Line" (maybe so, maybe no), I thought and think that there is a fair amount of Riefenstahl's aesthetic in that song. Which makes me ambivalent -- not condemnatory, ambivalent.

There's a lot of songs on the album that set up an idealisation/reality split, where the music is at least nominally on the side of the idealisation.

Hejira is also my favorite. 'Coyote' may be my favorite Joni Mitchell song. Jaco's bassline is something else on that tune.

I took her to a hockey game, too.

Yeah.

Good times.

I've been listening to Court & Spark most lately, actually. I only pull out Hejira for special occasions, when I really need it.

Having said that, didn't Joni have some erotic obsession with black men in the 1980s or something?

Don't forget, however, that we're talking about an album which is 30+ years old now. A lot's gone on in that time - and we can't really retrospectively apply the values we have today.

The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is a wonderful album, though. It ended up, along with Saint Etienne's last one, being the soundtrack to Summer 2005 for me. Her evocation of West Coast America contrasted with suburbia in Harry's House is intoxicating. And anyone who's had an affair with a 'free-thinking' bastard will relate directly to Don't Interrupt The Sorrow.

Put me down as a huge fan of [i]Hejira[/i] who needs to get [i]Hissing of Summer Lawns[/i] on cd after not having heard it for years. The box set of her 80's Geffen albums is endlessly fascinating. I forgot how good [i]Dog Eat Dog[/i] is. Surely "The Three Great Stimulants" is one of her best late career songs.

William

I think Hejira has some of the most well-crafted, evocative, etc. etc. etc., lyrics of any record I could name. Hissing of Summer Lawns is elliptical and inscrutable and disillusioned in the best possible way, but her narrative powers were at their absolute peak on Hejira, imho. It's had a huge influence not just on my own writing, but on the way I've processed events in my own life.

And in contrast to Hurting, above, I absolutely love the way it sounds - sparse, wintry, bell-clear. It's a gorgeous, timeless record, one of my top five of all time.

C&S has pretty great high points (title track! Trouble Child!) but there are some fillers and it somehow lacks the cohesiveness of the two following albums.