u/watermeloncholera

This song sounds like smiling but not being able to feel joy. It sounds like an hour or two into psychedelic trip where language and the typical processes tying you to reality have dissolved or reorganized, and you are not sure if something might eventually push you over the edge. It is the sound of waking up under the early-morning stars a few days into a roadtrip you told almost no one about, for a brief moment not knowing who you are or how you got there. It is the sound of a heartache that you can’t quite place.

It is the most “ambient“ song on Hejira, with sparse electric guitar and mallets melodies that build and retreat like waves, and each musical element teases it might get swept up into a fog. There is a guitar melody that teases conventional harmony with Re-Do-Re-Do, but I am not sure if a V chord is actually ever used in the song, imparting a feeling of hovering around.

Whenever she sings the name “Amelia,” it sounds like she sung it in reverse and then replaced it with the reversed version of it, like how people speak in the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. The lyrics will sometimes hit you with visceral or bizarre imagery, like “hexagram of the heavens“ or “geometric farms,” both of obscurity that’s unsurprising given the reclusive hejira from which she’s writing. But in a couple verses she resists obscurity: “I wish that he was here tonight…” and ”Maybe I’ve never really loved...” There was hurt that she wasn’t ready to share until halfway through the song, but it’s unsurprising given that the lyrics sound like they genuinely emerged from a stream of consciousness, with all the detours that one would expect.

Each verse builds some sort of intrigue or emotional tension, and as if fearing the heartbreak might eventually burst through and expose itself in all its rawness, she quells it in saying this love she experienced ”was just a false alarm.” She is tentative towards vulnerability in this song, and despite being the Joni Mitchell who wrote the forthright “A Case of You,“ where all her thoughts about an ex-lover were laid bare, she is now at her most elusive and mercurial, and there is no dramatic insight about this recent loss. It’s almost hard to believe that it really was “just a false alarm.”

The song ends with no guarantee on if love is attainable for her or even desired by her. Like most tracks on Hejira, it begins and ends with us stepping into and out of a scene in her hejira, with no particular apotheosis or resolution. It is this narrative uncertainty combined with the dreamy, loopy guitar and her chants of “Amelia” from the Black Lodge that make this song feel uncanny to me.

What a show, so tight, funky, and relentless. Never heard them before and was blown away. Grateful to experience this music while watching the tail-end of the sunset at the terrace.

I was walking into a busy city park, and in the near distance I encountered a couple of little girls crying on a bench. Their mother was losing her temper and scolding them for something, and it seemed like she was out-of-line. I yelled to the crying girls, “Sorry about your fat mom!” I wasn’t sure how they would take it, but they cried harder. Not only is their mom cruel, but she is also really fat.

Everyone nearby in the park overheard what I said. People, many of them fat women themselves, looked at me in disappointment. A fat, teenage girl turned to me and said, “You’re a fat mom.” I replied, “No I’m not,” and ran off. I could see fat women I knew from real life, such as a woman in my apartment management, starting to look at me. I hadn’t thought of the repercussions of what I said until it was too late. I was trying to send the message to the girls that not only is their mom cruel, but she is also fat.

I ran back to my hotel, hoping I could totally change my outfit and come back to the park, dressed in a way that I would be unrecognizable. To them, in their brief encounter of me, I was just an outspoken man in a green shirt, and it was something that could be easily changed.