Hejira is a 1976 folk/rock/jazz album by Canadiansinger-songwriterJoni Mitchell. The album title refers to a journey, specifically as a transliteration of the Arabic word hijra referring to the prophet Muhammad's and his followers' escape to Medina in 622. The songs on the album were largely written by Mitchell on a trip by car from Maine back to Los Angeles, California, with prominent imagery including highways, small towns and snow. Mitchell said of the album: "the whole 'Hejira' album was really inspired... I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it... The sweet loneliness of solitary travel." [1] Dominated by Mitchell's guitar and Jaco Pastorius's distinctive fretless bass, it drew on a range of influences but was more cohesive and accessible than some of her later more jazz-oriented work. "Coyote", "Amelia" and "Hejira" all became concert staples shortly after Hejira's release, especially after being featured on the live album Shadows and Light, alongside "Furry Sings the Blues" and "Black Crow". Though "Coyote" and "Black Crow" are fast-strummed folksy numbers, the rest of Hejira is slow and often languid, notably the epic "Song for Sharon", which deals with the conflict between freedom and marriage faced by a woman and is interspered with images of New York City. "Amelia" is about the famous aviator Amelia Earhart who died during a flight over the Pacific Ocean, of it Mitchell has said: "In ["Amelia"], I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another, ... sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do." [2] "Furry Sings the Blues" is inspired by a meeting that occurred between Mitchell and the blues guitarist and singer Furry Lewis in New Orleans in 1975 (though after the release of the song, Lewis complained that Mitchell had exploited the circumstances of the meeting). Commercially, the album did not do as well as its two predecessors, only reaching #13 on the Billboard Top 200 and failing to get significant airplay on commercial radio. Critically, the album was at the time not well received but has since been generally recognised as one of the high-water marks in Mitchell's career; in 2000 German Spex magazine critics voted it the 55th greatest album of the 20th century, calling it "a self-confident, coolly elegant design".
