RFBX: ‘It’s Genius, I Swear’ Special – Othello Woolf on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Hejira’
By: Othello Woolf
The album I've chosen is Hejira by Joni Mitchell. I like to turn the lights off, put on a pair of headphones and then be taken away to another world. The mood and colours Joni and her band create on this album is something else, unmatched in my opinion. Of particular note is Jaco Pastorius playing fretless bass - one of the greatest bassists of all time.
All of the songs flow along so naturally and have beautiful textured melodies. Joni's lyrics are some of the most brave and soul-baring and honest I have ever heard. It seems like she's going through a time in her life of sadness and a melancholic longing for love and companionship.
She's in that place where you're out of love and you feel self-conscious and have low self-worth: "He's got a woman at home, he's got another woman down the hall but he seems to want me anyway."
To me it seems she's also in a place where she's trying to get on with her life as best she can, and in doing that acutely observing the world around her - like the best novelists and poets, expertly describing in her own way what she sees. But she can't avoid the longing thoughts of love that keep bubbling to the surface wherever she goes - "I went to Staten Island to buy myself a mandolin and I saw the long white dress of love on a storefront mannequin".
Some albums are timeless and this is one of them. It helps that Joni Mitchell has always refused to work with producers, insisting that this would date her music with a sonic stamp of whatever the current production trend is during the album's creation. Self-produced, all of her albums have a purity and directness because of this - no filter between you and the artist.
Artists in this article: Othello Woolf, Joni Mitchell