There is a moment on “Amelia” — about two minutes in, after Joni has already told you she’s driving through the desert thinking about Amelia Earhart and about a man she can’t stop loving — where Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass curls up underneath her guitar like smoke finding a vent, and you realize this whole album was built around that feeling.
Hejira was recorded in late 1976, mostly at A&M Studios in Hollywood, with a handful of overdubs done at Columbia Recording in New York. Mitchell had just come off the back of a cross-country road trip she took after leaving a relationship — the title is an Arabic word for journey, specifically the flight of Muhammad from Mecca — and the songs landed fully formed from that windshield time.
The Jaco Problem (In The Best Way)
She’d seen Jaco play with Weather Report and knew immediately. He was twenty-four years old and had released his debut solo record just that year. Mitchell didn’t want a conventional rhythm section; she wanted something underneath her that moved the way her guitar vonings moved — sideways, harmonically ambiguous, unresolved.
So there is almost no conventional rhythm on this record. No drummer on most tracks. Max Bennett and Larry Carlton sit in here and there, but it’s largely Mitchell’s open-tuned guitar and Jaco, with Neil Young’s old pedal steel player Ben Keith adding texture. That absence of a kit is not minimalism as concept. It’s a decision made because a snare hit would’ve been wrong.
Engineer Henry Lewy — who had worked with Mitchell since Ladies of the Canyon and understood her studio instincts better than almost anyone — kept everything dry and present. No reverb cushion to hide in. Every note is right there in the room with you.
What She’s Actually Singing About
The record is ostensibly about the end of her relationship with drummer John Guerin, though Mitchell has always resisted single-source readings. “Song for Sharon” runs nearly nine minutes and addresses a childhood friend from Saskatchewan in a way that somehow becomes a meditation on every choice a woman makes about her own life.
It is, I’ll say it plainly, the best song on the album and one of the best songs she ever wrote.
“Black Crow” has a momentum that surprises people — almost percussive in its open-string attack — and it shows how much she’d developed as a guitarist, building a vocabulary of tunings that no one else was using and has mostly not been able to replicate since. She was playing almost like a pianist by this point, thinking in full harmonic blocks rather than melody-over-chord.
After Midnight
This is an album that reveals itself in the second or third listen, and it reveals itself best late. The fretless bass sits in the low-mid range in a way that a good pair of headphones or a warm integrated into decent standmounts will reward — you want to feel Jaco’s lines, not just hear them.
Hejira didn’t get the attention it deserved on release. It peaked at 13 on the Billboard 200 and reviewers at the time were slightly puzzled by it, which is its own kind of recommendation. The listeners who found it found it hard and kept it.
Put it on when the house is quiet. Start with “Amelia.” Give it the room.