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The Best Joni Mitchell Song EverAn ode to obsessive listening.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2007, at 10:56 AM ET
Joni Mitchell. Click image to expand.

This is a love letter. To a love song. One I keep returning to. One I keep feeling I need to do justice to. I don't know if I can, but I'll try.

A couple of months ago, I'd gone back to playing it. Only I can't play it just once. I have to play it over and over again for hours on end. I can't get enough of it. It's not just a love song: It's a road song, it's a motel song, it's a Southwestern desert song, it's a disappearance and death song. It's a Joni Mitchell song. It's "Amelia."

People get that way about Joni Mitchell songs. Bob Dylan once told me that he'd written "Tangled up in Blue," the opening song of the much-celebrated Blood on the Tracks, after spending a weekend immersed in JM's Blue (although I think he may have been talking about the whole album, not just the song).

I'm subject to similar bouts of musical addiction, periods when I get tangled up in a song like "Amelia" and play it over and over again for hours, sometimes days at a time.

It's not just Joni Mitchell, not just a certain type of female singer-songwriter I have an obsession with. (Although I do revere Rickie Lee Jones and Rosanne Cash.) It's a certain kind of song, one that seems to activate some sort of hard-wired emotional cell cluster in my brain, I'm (unscientifically) convinced. Songs that do for me what crack does for other people.

Recent songs I've been binge-listening to: Smokey Robinson's "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage"; Willie Nelson's version of Rodney Crowell's "Till I Gain Control Again"; Roger McGuinn's version of Dylan's "Up to Me"; and Van Morrison's "Crazy Love." (Do Slate readers go on these marathon, days-long, single-song benders? If so, please post about your latest in the Fray.)

Why "Amelia" now? Well, I had been on the road a bit more than usual this year because I had a fellowship at the University of Chicago. But all that flying could just as easily have put me on an Emmylou Harris "Boulder to Birmingham" jet-lag jag. I think it must have been the release of the new JM album Shine, which I liked but didn't love. That and the discovery that the 33 1/3 series had come out with a Joni Mitchell booklet.

Do you know the 33 1/3 series? Everyone I know who cares about music in a smart way is talking about it. Small, short, pocket-sized monographs (from Continuum), each devoted to a single album. In an age of digital downloads of single tracks that has resulted in the atomization of the album, it's almost a landmarks preservation project. But what landmarks! Some that always need rediscovery (Dusty in Memphis, Kick Out the Jams); some so renowned they need to be reknown: Highway 61 Revisited is revisited, as is that other great thoroughfare album, Exile on Main Street.

I like the idea of the project, although I've always thought that focusing on the album as the aesthetic unit can distract from closer focus on individual songs. Not all albums have the intentionality, the unity, the "concept" attributed to them by critics, and deep-think about albums can become a distorting lens that diminishes the attentiveness certain songs deserve. This approach leads to the neglect of some tracks that leave their respective albums in the dust, the part sometimes being greater than the whole. (Not all Shakespeare's sonnets are equal or inseparable from the sequence, if you ask me.)

Especially since some album cuts are included (and sequenced) for technical or commercial reasons that may be irrelevant to the "concept" at hand. ("Up to Me" was left off the final version of Blood on the Tracks; both song and album might have been conceptually different if it had not been orphaned, but in a way I'm glad it was).

And sometimes a single song just so far surpasses the album you find it on that you wish there were a booklet devoted to it alone. (I'd call the series "One-Track Mind.") I wish there were a booklet devoted to "Amelia." There is a novel that precedes the song by several years, one that shares some of the same landscape, physical and emotional: Joan Didion's classic of post-romantic desert anomie, Play It As It Lays. The song could serve as the soundtrack for the novel, or the novel as recommended reading post-"Amelia." (Indeed, what about a series of essays that pairs great novels with a playlist of kindred songs?)

The Joni Mitchell monograph that 33 1/3 came out with this year is extremely well-written (by Seattle musician Sean Nelson), and it displays all the virtues of smart music writing by people who actually know and play music. But—if you ask me—it's about the wrong album. It's about Court and Spark.

Now, some of you might want to leave the room for a moment, because I'm going to say something a little heretical, if not intentionally mean. To my mind, Court and Spark isn't Joni Mitchell music so much as Joni Mitchell Muzak. Joni Mitchell doing aural wallpaper patterns, generic Joni Mitchell. On a high plane, sure, but to me, too coolly intellectual, emotionally distant.

I don't necessarily think all of Hejira, the album on which "Amelia" appears, is on a high plane. (It does have perhaps her sexiest song in the lowdown "Coyote.") But you couldn't get on a higher plane than her song evoking that brave and lost aviator Amelia Earhart.

"Amelia" is the hejira within Hejira, the metaphoric flight. (The original meaning of the term, of course, is the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina.) In this case the singer, whoever she is (I don't like straight autobiographical translations of songs, even ones that sound "personal") is "driving across the burning desert" in the aftermath of a crash-and-burn romance in which she's "asked to kindly stay away." (What an idiot, whoever he was.) As she drives, she's thinking of Amelia Earhart, the "ghost of aviation," who is presumed to have crashed in some Pacific paradise still unknown.

And she's thinking of herself, in terms of that lonely, brave, romantic flier, in terms of "Icarus ascending/ on beautiful foolish arms." (You've got to hear her ravishing vocalization of that phrase "beautiful foolish arms"!) Someone who long looked down at love from "icy altitudes" who then "crashed into [the] arms" of someone who left her lost and stranded. Unlike Amelia, she still has "the refuge of the roads" (the title of the last and second-most haunting song on Hejira, a classic in itself, and a kind of coda to "Amelia").

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Photograph of Joni Mitchell by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As subjective as these things may be, "Song For Sharon", off the same album, is a far better song than "Amelia". At eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds it tells a story as rich and time-bending and real-feeling and heart-breaking as anything by Alice Munro (who, as another prominent canadian artist of the era, shares many of Joni Mitchell's obesessions).

"Amelia" is a good song, granted, but I've never liked it's references to "burning deserts" (a terrible phrase) or Cactus Motels.

"Song For Sharon" feels like it was drawn directly from Joni Mitchell's life--youthful dreams of what marriage was supposed to represent versus her now-adult disillusionment, all triggered by attending the wedding of an old friend. A simple, classic story that reaches its apex when she.adds a new twist to the contrast by recognizing that her friend--Sharon, the one getting married--also had dreams of playing music and still performs for family and friends, while Joni performs for...well, for us.

--amble

(To reply, click here.)

I will happily concede to those who make the case for Blue or Court and Spark as Joni Mitchell's best albums. I agree with them. But I have long felt Hejira to be underrated in the JM canon despite the considerable love reserved for some its individual songs. Oddly enough, I think of Hejira as a guitar album; that is, a guitar album in which some of the guitar parts seem to have been poured straight out of paint jars or wine bottles.

I wish I was capable of writing a companion piece to Mr. Rosenbaum's devoted simply to describing the ravishing guitar playing on "Amelia". Joni's rhythm guitar might have itself sufficed for "Amelia" as it did for "Coyote" but Larry Carlton's lead guitar goes well past what could have been merely exquisite ornamentation and ratchets the whole song up to the stratosphere. Whether evoking "the drone of flying engines" or "Icarus ascending", Carlton plays with extraordinary restraint throughout hitting harmonics and working his volume pedal with consummate precision. The overall effect is that of a kind of tightly controlled delirium. (Mention should also be made of Victor Feldman's vibes which complement Carlton's playing perfectly.)

--marcegoodman

(To reply, click here.)

Time's Arrow Press is working on starting a new series called "The Eclectic Dialectic," inviting essayists, poets, and fiction writers to respond in creative ways to a single classic album. Rather than the "33 1/3" book series, which is limited to just one author writing directly about one album, this series will feature several authors and will give them much more freedom to explore the nature and extent of the music's inspiration.

There may be a poem or story that connects to the feeling or tonality of a song, a story that gives a sequel or prequel to the story in a set of lyrics, new lyrics to instrumental tracks, etc. Basically it's literature that is in the same *key* of the music, not necessarily literature that is *about* the music. As Rosenbaum says, it would be perfect "recommended reading for after" listening to a favorite record.

The first three books in the works are "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis, and "The Doors" by the Doors. We're also going ahead and collecting good stuff for future volumes, so if you have something that you think would work well for some other classic album, we'll be happy to take a look. (I'm open to suggestions about a volume on Mitchell's "Hejira"....are you listening, Mr. Rosenbaum?) If you're interested, please visit Time's Arrow at www.timesarrowpress.com for submission guidelines. (The Eclectic Dialectic series isn't up yet on the web page because it is still in the works, but consider this a sneak preview. Early birds, etc.)

Thanks,
Allen Michie
Director, Time's Arrow Press

--allenmichie

(To reply, click here.)

(12/16)

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