Hejira, womanhood, etc

I first discover Joni Mitchell’s Hejira on a subway train.

(An F train, specifically, on the way to the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.)

Until this F train Joni-Mitchell-Baptism I have a readily rehearsed adage on why she is not for me. “She’s my mother’s music,” I’ll tell you, with all the unearned swagger a 19 year old can muster. “Sure, she’s fine. But her voice is too high. It’s just not for me.”

(One time a brilliant but blunt aunt tells me I haven’t lived enough time as a woman when I deliver this readily rehearsed adage)
(And though her patented brand of communication is accurate in this case, it’s just cruel enough to make me contrarily stick to my guns)
(I’ll show her)
(By not listening to great music!)
(Joni Mitchell just isn’t for me, okay?!)

But I’m on this F train now and I regretfully have to concede my mistake. My mom was right, my aunt was right. Joni Mitchell is so very for me. Song for Sharon hits me like a god damn ton of bricks.

I went to Staten Island, Sharon
To buy myself a mandolin
And I saw the long white dress of love
On a storefront mannequin
Big boat chuggin' back with a belly full of cars
All for something lacy
Some girl's going to see that dress
And crave that day like crazy

Man. Song for Sharon.

I am 19 years old and already clearly destined for a life that won’t be easily explained at high school reunions. I’m getting two degrees, I know I’ll work in music. At the moment, though, I’m also working a horrific job dodging drunk patrons, balancing $18 bottles of vodka priced at $2,000, and smiling like my four inch heels and many patrons in the joint aren’t trying to murder me. It’s 2009 and I am knee deep, in Joni’s words, in the dream’s malfunction.

(12 years later I’ll also wear a something lacy)
(Pledge my allegiance to a man so perfect for me it feels confusing and scary and ecstatic)
(Caked in makeup I did not want on my face because I do not yet know how to stand up for myself)

But today I am 19 years old. And Joni Mitchell, it feels, is speaking directly to me.

Sharon I left my man
At a North Dakota junction
And I came out to the "Big Apple" here
To face the dream's malfunction
Love's a repetitious danger
You'd think I'd be accustomed to
Well I do accept the changes
At least better than I used to do

At least better than I used to do.
(At least! Better than I used to do!)
Her honesty, her ambivalence shouldering right up next to confidence.
My life changes with every word.

I miss my stop at 14th street and happily reroute at 34th when I notice the error.

Eventually the F train guides me back to New School, where I am studying alongside a bunch of sweet and delightfully insufferable jazz nerds. They argue passionately about the superiority of Eric Dolphy’s lesser-known works and worship at the altar of Albert Ayler. Their idea of small talk is debating the best mixed meter time signatures for avant-garde compositions. Not the audience, in other words, for the intricacies of my new queen of poetry.

(That’s fine)
(I deserve some joy for myself, after all)
(And when something is this brilliant do you really need to share it?)
(Or can you just hoard it, blast it in your headphones at Caffe Reggio, feel that you, New York City and Joni Mitchell are the only three things on earth right now?)

The album unfolds in all its gorgeous splendor. I spend months straight in Song for Sharon until my next discovery. The crown jewel.

Amelia. A masterpiece of lyrics and music. Next level evocative storytelling blended with complex, jazz-influenced melodies that my student cohort should love. Themes of flight, freedom, the search for identity.

Friends go, men go, Joni helps it all make sense. I grow into the woman my aunt told me I wasn’t yet, and Joni Mitchell is there for me at every step.

(I graduate into anarchy, the global economy still reeling from the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis)
(Gangnam Style is a thing, nothing really makes sense)
(But I am me, after all, a human who finds solace in the rotations of wheels, the feeling of road underneath her, the, the…)

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture post card charms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

Friends go, men go, Joni helps it all make sense.

(It takes me approximately 300 listens to Amelia, btw, before I even catch the Amelia Earhart reference)
(When I do I sit on the ground and weep that she gave us all this gift)

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea
Like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

Friends go, men go, Joni helps it all make sense.

Life comes at me in the way it does to someone destined for a life that won’t be easily explained at high school reunions.

(I date a little 5’5 sociopath from the Netherlands, fall in love with him, let him walk all over me, find solace in the album’s title track)

In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I am returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed

I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl

(Befriend fabulous women across the coasts of America)
(Some are worth staying friends with, some are happy to have me cater to their every whim as sidekick)
(Ultimately I learn to value myself)

A woman I knew just drowned herself
The well was deep and muddy
She was just shaking off futility
Or punishing somebody
My friends were calling up all day yesterday
All emotions and abstractions
It seems we all live so close to that line
and so far from satisfaction

(Build a dream situation with the love of my life)
(Watch it fall apart)
(Build it again)

People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Oh, Amelia it was just a false alarm

And eventually land back in Los Angeles. I’ve done this before, but I know in my core that something is different.

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn't see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here, least of all

Me here, least of all. The futility of it, the beauty of it. Hejra lands for me again, on vinyl, in digital, in all its forms.

And somehow, multiple times over the past three years, I become acquainted with near death.

When I look that friend I never wanted in the face again this time, it’s a different feeling. A ground underneath my feet feeling. Every time I tell people about the whole experience - about the diagnosis, the near death, the 8 days at Cedars, they all say the same thing.

“That must have been so scary.”

But it wasn’t. It simply was.

Now there are twenty-nine skaters on Wollman Rink
Circling in singles and in pairs
In this vigorous anonymity
A blank face at the window stares and
stares and stares and stares and stares
And the power of reason
And the flowers of deep feeling
Seem to serve me
Only to deceive me

The power of reason, the flowers of deep feeling, they all slip away as the deceptions that they are. And you’re left, really, with a moment to look around and assess it all. To ask yourself the real, wild, essential question: “What do I really truly want this life to look like?”

(And that, my darling, is a gift.)

So I guess what I’m saying is… always listen to your mother.

(Your biological one or your Joni Mitchell one)

I claim both.

More next week.
t

ps: it’s worth saying that my best friend Dylan (who by now I hope you feel is your best friend, by proxy) helped me with that ending. Maybe the best ending I’ve written yet on these here ttalks and it was not a solo venture.
pps: Worth saying, too, that his mother, Michele, is a god damn goddess who should always be listened to
ppps: I love you.