133. Joni Mitchell, "Hejira"

 


I maintain two Best Of lists in my head that sometimes overlap.  Like I have a mental list of the Best Albums of All Time, and it sometimes, but not always intersects with My Favorite Albums.  (We'll see how much it intersects with this list.)  To take a recent example, I'm sure Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is a brilliant album, but it just didn't speak to me.  (I was gonna make a snarky comment about the Grammys' Best Album of the Year always being dreck but looking back on it now, they got it right a surprising amount of times!  Last year was Taylor Swift's folklore, an album I absolutely adore, and they gave it to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Speakerboxx/The Love Below.  There are a lot of really bad misses, but they occasionally hit!)

This is all a really really long and boring way of saying that I guess this album is critically revered and people love it or whatever but I fucking hated it so much that every second listening to it felt like an eternity and I really entertained thoughts of just turning it off halfway through and admitting defeat.  Fucking.  Hated.  It.

So what's it all about?  It's Joni Mitchell playing guitar and the famed Jaco Pastorious playing fretless bass and some other people and Joni plays some weird chords and then just kinda sings whatever tune pops into her head and if it has anything to do with the song that's fine but if it doesn't that's fine too and she just kinda makes it up as she goes and then the song ends.  

Look I know I'm probably a rube and an outlier for even suggesting this.  (Sample comments from the Youtube of "Coyote," the first song: "Purely magical.  God reached out and touched us with a song." "I once listened to song on repeat for days.   She seems to have touched a many soul in a special way." "2 the 8, wh@ more can u possibly want? Got 2 b, 1 troll with 8 heads. 1 luv still.")  And yet here we are.  There must be something fundamental about this that I'm just missing, like maybe I have to give up my love for verses and choruses and standard songwriting?

I kept thinking about Joanna Newsom, a more modern artist clearly influenced by Mitchell, who I also couldn't stand at first but who I've slowly grown to like more (and respect a great deal).  Maybe that will happen here.  But for now, this is not my thing.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Yeah, sure.  No, I'm just fucking with you.  No way.

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