The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task.
Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1959, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female.
“Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”
Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde.
Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train.
The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan