Joni Mitchell remembers the moment she played her new album, Hejira, for a certain country star back in 1976. “Bonnie Raitt brought Dolly Parton to town,” she tells Cameron Crowe in the liner notes for her new Archives, Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980). “And we played back the album, and she listened. And when it was over, she turned to me and said, ‘If I thought that deep, I’d scare myself to death.’”
Parton’s reaction is an apt description for Archives Vol. 4, a collection that gives listeners a bird’s-eye view into those deep thoughts. It spans just five years, but Mitchell covered a lot of ground in this period — briefly joining Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and taking a massive (at times confounding) creative leap as she expanded her sound deeper into jazz fusion on 1976’s legendary Hejira, 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and 1979’s Mingus, her collaboration with jazz great Charles Mingus.
Archives Vol. 4 kicks off in the fall of 1975, when Mitchell was on the Rolling Thunder Revue. We all know that video of her performing the now-classic Hejira track “Coyote” for Dylan and Roger McGuinn in Gordon Lightfoot’s home, but the first disc offers another cut from that house visit: the heavily underrated “Woman of Heart and Mind” from 1972’s For the Roses. That’s just three years earlier, but Mitchell introduces it as “an old one,” indicating how much she’s grown in such a short amount of time. “You come to me like a little boy,” she sings, “And I give you my scorn and my praise.”
There are several gems and rarities on here, like the gorgeous “embryonic” version of “Paprika Plains,” a 12-minute piano instrumental producer Henry Lewy secretly recorded and labeled “Save Magic.” You can feel Mitchell sketching out what would eventually become the centerpiece of Don Juan, her fingers feeling for the keys as she seamlessly improvises for minutes on end. Stripped of its orchestral flourishes and lyrics from the official version (“No matter what you do/I’m floating back, I’m floating back to you!” she muses), we’re able to get a sense of her creative process that often seems daunting, shrouded in genius and mystery. (When Mitchell reissued her late Seventies records over the summer, she was sure to replace the original Don Juan cover of her in blackface).
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But you won’t find much piano on Disc Three. That’s because it contains demos for the beloved Hejira, which Mitchell famously wrote while traveling cross-country. “That’s why there were no piano songs,” she explained to us. “Hejira was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted: Running away, honorably.” The 1976 sessions — recorded in Los Angeles in the spring and summer — are intimate and incisive, like the gorgeous “Amelia” and the contemplative closer “Refuge of the Roads,” written about an encounter with Tibetian Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa.
The late bassist Jaco Pastorius first worked with Mitchell on Hejira, but he’s sprinkled throughout the release, with a live solo included on the fifth disc, taken from a show at Queens’ Forest Hills Stadium in August 1979. It’s obvious why Mitchell was fascinated by his playing — his riveting, fretless funk made for a fitting addition to her sonic journey that was the late Seventies.
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Diehard Mitchell fans will run to the live introductions of songs here, like her explaining the genesis of the intricate Mingus, when she wrote lyrics to the legend’s compositions as his life was ending. At the Bread & Roses Festival in Berkeley, California in Sept. 1978, she tells the crowd, “When I sing this, imagine me to be about this big, pissed off and romantic and seriously ill — hopefully not finally ill — and staring out the window of the 44th floor of a building in New York that overlooks the Hudson River.”
Speaking about “Coyote,” she admits to the Rolling Thunder crowd that she’s not sure if the track is finished. “Maybe there’s a couple of more chapters to go,” she says. Then and now, wherever the journey takes her, we’re sure to follow.
