A haunting image that reveals the soul of a unique artist
‘Every time I worked with Joni, she’d arrive as a different character’
Joni Mitchell: Hejira (1976)
‘Ihave always considered myself a painter derailed by circumstances,” Joni Mitchell once claimed. She initially only started playing music as “a hobby” to keep her in cigarettes in art school but developed into one of the most complex and innovative songsmiths to emerge from the Sixties folk revival. Mitchell always designed her own covers. “I trained as a commercial artist, as well as a fine artist. So I thought album art was a great way to keep both careers alive.”
More than half her 19 studio albums display Mitchell’s paintings, varying in style from the floral hippy innocence of Song to a Seagull (1968) and Clouds (1969) to the symbolically loaded tableaux of The Hissing
of Summer Lawns (1975) and Dog Eat Dog (1985). Her most haunting cover, though, was a complex photo montage whose creation reveals a great deal about Mitchell’s painstaking approach to her art.
What is it?
Hejira was Mitchell’s eighth studio album, released in 1976. The title is a transliteration of an Arabic word (usually rendered as Hegira or Hijra) meaning departure or rupture, specifically relating to the prophet Mohammed fleeing Mecca in 622.
She interpreted it as “running away with honour”, a thematic motif for songs composed during three road trips across America in the bicentennial year, wrestling with feelings of displacement as a woman yearning for life beyond romantic and societal expectations.
The grey-toned cover shows Mitchell appearing out of a snowblasted, frozen landscape, the ghostly soft-edged blackness of her body containing an empty road vanishing towards a cloudy horizon. The original vinyl gatefold sleeve opens out to reveal a male ice-skater in the background, dancing elegantly around an isolated figure in a bridal gown. Images of skating and brides feature in the autobiographical nine-minutelong Song for Sharon, addressed to a childhood friend from Saskatchewan, the province where the Canadian-born Mitchell’s family lived for a while. On the inside sleeve, the black clad skater has transformed into Mitchell herself, flying across the ice, raggedy cape spread like wings of the bird in her song Black Crow: “black as the highway that’s leading me … In search of love and music/ My whole life has been/ Illumination/ Corruption/ And diving, diving, diving, diving/ Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing.”
The story behind the cover
It seems likely that Mitchell was thinking about this cover almost as long as she was composing the album. The original photo shoot took place on the spur of the moment. Mitchell was on tour with a band including her drummer boyfriend John Guerin. Tensions were high, exacerbated by a new song, Coyote, addressing Mitchell’s affair with writer and actor Sam Shepard. The couple broke up following a concert in Madison, Wisconsin on February 29 1976 and the tour ground to a halt in disarray.
Mitchell and some of her crew were still in the area on March 4 when a huge ice storm struck, freezing nearby Lake Mendota overnight. Mitchell and photographer Joel Bernstein set off on a mission, stopping only to buy black ice skates from a local sports store.
Wearing a beret, long black dress and fur cape, Mitchell braved bitter winds and thawing ice to skate. The “unruly” final images, though, didn’t quite capture the qualities of “melancholy and movement” that Mitchell wanted. Mitchell then came up with another elaborate concept, involving Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston (“You sing, don’t you?” he remarked when she called him). She rented out a hockey arena and had Cranston skate around a figure dressed as a bride. In some shots, Mitchell herself skated down a painted line in her “kind of gawky” style. Again, however, she was not entirely satisfied with the results.
The majority of the album was written during a road trip to Maine with two friends (one of whom was a former lover immortalised unflatteringly in the song A Strange Boy), after which, Mitchell drove solo back to California, via Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, without a driving licence. In Los Angeles, she embarked on a third photo shoot with frequent collaborator Norman Sheeff.
A former South African doctor and anti-apartheid activist (who helped shelter Nelson Mandela when he was on the run in the Sixties), Sheeff had reinvented himself as a rock photographer, working with The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis and Frank Zappa, among many others.
“Every time I worked with Joni, she’d arrive as a different character,” according to Sheeff. “Beyond being the most incredible musician, she’s a painter and performance artist, a conceptualist.” For Hejira, she wanted
Sheeff to make her look “haunted, like an Ingmar Bergman figure”.
Mitchell used 14 different images from all three sessions on the sleeve, resizing them on an optical device known as a Camera Lucida, then rephotographing the results. “If I had done the cover as a collage, it would have looked much more primitive,” Mitchell has said. An airbrusher corrected light sources, contributing to the image’s dreamily soft-edged quality. “At that point my stock was up,” she has wryly noted. “They let me do all sorts of expensive things in terms of art. Even Madonna couldn’t get [that kind of budget] these days.”
What is the music like?
Hejira is one of Mitchell’s undisputed masterpieces. The sound is stripped back, Mitchell playing electric guitar in open tunings to conjure long, unresolved musical phrases as a loose frame for some of her most insightful personal and philosophical musings. Innovative fretless jazz bassist Jaco Pastorious offers a limber shadow to Mitchell’s thoughtful vocals, with light percussion helping maintain the restless momentum of these emotional travelogues.
The tension between domesticity and independence, love and art pushes and pulls songs in multiple directions, but after Blue Moon’s comforting dream of romantic reunion, the final track returns her to the Refuge of
the Road. Mitchell’s turn of phrase throughout is electrifying (“A woman I knew just drowned herself/ The well was deep and muddy/ She was just shaking off futility/ Or punishing somebody”). It is an extraordinary album of sacrifice and escape.
What is its legacy?
It may have been the pinnacle of Mitchell’s career, the last of her albums to receive universal acclaim. As her work got jazzier, she fell out of fashion with critics and the general public. Mitchell continued writing and recording, albeit with declining frequency, while devoting more time and energy to painting, which she may be alone in considering the best use of her talents. She hasn’t released an album since Shine in 2007, and suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm in 2015. Nevertheless, at 76 she remains revered as a trailblazing female artist, one of the most dazzlingly brilliant singer-songwriters of all time.