Joni Mitchell

Some records are meant to be listened to, some danced to. Hejira is meant to be absorbed. With doomed Jaco Pastorius making an appearance and Mitchell's usual predilection for putting jazz and folk together in overdrive, this is the singer-songwriter's most adventurous album. If there is a cooler song than "Coyote," we can't find it.

It is the tug of war between the symbolist and the siren that makes Joni Mitchell's albums
alternately alluring and forbidding. On the one hand she is the most ruthlessly analytical
member of the music-as-therapy songwriting school, and often her songs seem intent only
on making private sense of her own experience. On the other hand, as a public performer,
Mitchell wants to be heard and even enjoyed. To that end she conducts a cool fl... More >

Album eight is most impressive for the cunning with which Mitchell subjugates melody to the natural music of language itself. Whereas in the past only her naive intensity has made it possible to overlook her old-fashioned prosody, here she achieves a sinuous lyricism that is genuinely innovative. Unfortunately, the chief satisfaction of Mitchell's words--the way they map a woman's reality--seems to diminish as her autonomy increases. The reflections of a rich, faithless, compulsively mobile, and compulsively romantic female are only marginally more valuable than those of her marginally more privileged male counterparts, especially the third or fourth time around. It ain't her, bub, it ain't her you're lookin' for. (Grade - B+)