Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Available for 29 days

There's a scene in Martin Scorsese's documentary film about Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, where we're at Gordon Lightfoot's house, and Joni Mitchell is playing one of her songs to the assembled throng of Dylan himself, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and a few others, and it's immediately clear that she's light years ahead of everyone else. And if you need proof of that, her own 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns has it in spades. Having emerged at the end of the 60s in the fertile folk scene, by this point in the 70s, she's very much following her own muse, drawing from jazz, electronica, and other more esoteric forms of music. This episode of Long Player looks at the musical journey undertaken by Joni Mitchell at the end of the seventies, which begins with The Hissing of Summer Lawns.