Hejira by Joni Mitchell

Hejira, Joni Mitchell's eighth studio album, came out on Asylum in 1976, and it's a road record in the deepest sense: she wrote it while traveling almost constantly in late 1975 and early 1976, and the songs carry the restlessness of those months on the road. She produced it herself.

The songs are long, wordy and unhurried, drifting like a car on an empty road, and the backing comes from jazz players, above all Jaco Pastorius, whose fretless bass sings and slides around her guitar like a second voice. Larry Carlton adds guitar and John Guerin plays drums. "Coyote", the opening track and the single, swings with sly, easygoing wit, while "Amelia" and "Song for Sharon" stretch out into reverie. It didn't sell like the albums before it, though it still went gold in the US and silver in the UK, but critics liked it then and it has come to be seen as one of the high points of her career.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.