“I’ll Lay Down the Highway: (Virtual) Travels with Joni" by Arden Levine
In mid-2020, a sad scatter of discarded Lonely Planet guides appeared on a stoop near my apartment. I took a photo and sent it to a friend with the caption, “You ain’t going nowhere.” To leave one place for another had become a thing no longer done. Yet finding an elsewhere to write from/about/into is what writers do. Suddenly I needed a tour guide who could speed me down the freeway as I stayed put. I turned to Hejira, Joni Mitchell’s crisscross-country travelogue.
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this album over the years. Its jazz rhythms and poetry-for-lyrics often inform my stanza structures, line breaks, and language choices. This past year, though, the album became something more for me. A gas pedal. Or a propeller. Or an outboard motor.
And away we go.
Lesson/Track 1 – Coyote: Yes, jazz rhythms for your journey.
It’s understandable if Joni’s early folk fare is what pops into your mental tape deck when I mention her name, but her later career has a much smokier vibe, a little brass and bass, hushed percussion, electric currents. Start at the start, a story of the breakup that sends her to the fuel pump. The whole song is an exercise in mismatching subject and presentation: She may be glibly escaping her affair — the melody is a bongo shimmy-shake and a devil-may-care toss of blond swept back by highway breeze — but take the cowboy-done-me-wrong lamentation in the lyrics and you figure that she’s sitting at tomorrow’s table, quite still, just like you are. Writers are liars, and she’s a good one. Neat trick.
Lesson/Track 2 – Amelia: I actually hate flying.
Yet even I felt restricted and confined by the inability to journey truly safely by air this past year-plus. Joni shows that you actually can toss a bucket into the well of stuck-here-ness and winch up some useful ink. “The drone of flying engines is a song so wild and blue / it scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you.” These aren’t lines you write from a plane. They’re lines that you write when you miss a plane, when you miss it enough to conjure the word-mechanics that transform your desk into an aerojalopy and send it clattering into the sun rays out the window. It’s the wistfulness that fuels the craft.
Lesson/Track 3 – Furry Sings the Blues: Wrong turn.
A solidly decent itinerary-maker can sometimes get lost, mistake pilgrimage sites for tourist destinations, forget that she is the stranger in town and that the town may not want her kind of strange. During the pandemic, the ability to relocate became another indicator of inequity, a privilege still available to those with means. And when Joni gawks down her nose at a “down-and-out” Memphis, playing back-seat anthropologist from her “limo shining on [a] shanty street,” there’s the writer-navigator record-scratch: Joni just gave me bad directions. I should not follow her this time.
I’m an urban policy wonk by trade. I spend plenty of time thinking about geography, and the catalog of social conditions that expand or limit access to space. Some desk chair analytics, then: Joni rides to town to peer at what she depicts as a decaying city. She attempts homage and reverence for aging blues-great Furry Lewis, but instead creates an embellished caricature (much to his dismay). Joni reveals herself as tin-eared to the responsibility of writer to subject (a subject, in this case bedridden to a time and place while the writer is so free to wander). Joni meant well, intention being good enough for her moment in history, but not mine. So, I fashion from her missteps a different kind of compass, revealing where a teller of stories should tread compassionately, inquisitively, conscientiously—or not at all.
Lesson/Track 4 – A Strange Boy: A certain supposed purpose to travel.
In the romanticized version of jet-setting, the encounters become the affairs become the material. I do not live this life (neither in times of isolation nor liberation), so I am grateful for Joni’s virtual reality tour of exhibitionistic skepticism and fly-by-night romance-cum-heartache. In this song, the subject is an actual flight attendant who serves as Joni’s companion for the length of a long-haul drive from L.A. to Maine. But unlike “Coyote,” this song is all dirge and distress, a reminder of the fugitive intimacy generated in the rented beds of elsewhere. Recalling the loneliness that follows at the check-out desk, though (in the somber piano, the solemn conclusions), maybe you’re glad to have made that trek only in your mind’s eye (and your keyboard’s fingers).
Lesson/Track 5 – Hejira: Lean on the steering wheel and write.
Like I said, I use the album for actual prompts, free-drafting and fast-scratching while it plays. Okay, try this: Sibilance stirred in with one hard consonant and one soft one. (Per Joni: “Palm trees in the porch light like slick black cellophane.”) Cool, now how about: Drop a string of dactyls into a stanza without otherwise discernable prosody. (Per Joni: “Now there are twenty-nine skaters on Wollman Rink.”) Great, now for fun: Go put yourself in three geographical places where you aren’t, simultaneously. (Per Joni: “While flags like winter chimneys / wave truce against the moon / in the mirror of a modern bank / from the window of a hotel room.” Was that three or four places? I guess it depends on whether she was actually in the hotel room . . . and whether you count the moon.)
Lesson/Track 6 – Song for Sharon: Horizons better observed from far off.
My partner, also a writer, lived abroad for a year early in our relationship, a time that yielded endless screens of email content. Now constantly together (especially last year), we no longer miss each other. Instead, we miss the discipline of journaling at someone across a too-wide-to-text time difference. When Joni sings an eight-minute epistle to a childhood friend who remained in her hometown, listing activities and reflections and seemingly finding the narrative as she goes, the result reads like that foundational advice: write such that your writing doesn’t sound like writing. We have all been away-from, apart-from. So when I can’t write poems, I write letters to those dear and distant (“distant” has had a fluid definition, recently), and try to convey myself, literally and literately. Joni reminds me that this counts — and her reminder comes in mellow mono-pace with whispering cymbals. Engaging with her purely sonically works, too.
Lesson/Tracks 7 & 8 – Black Crow & Blue Motel Room: The undervalued interior views.
There comes a point (somewhat satisfyingly under the circumstance) at which Joni slowly starts making adventures sound exhausting. “I took the ferry to the highway / Then I drove to a pontoon plane / I took a plane to a taxi / And a taxi to a train / I've been traveling so long / How'm I ever gonna know my home / When I see it again?” These worries are so opposite our recent moment that they are paradoxically grounding. For (what felt like) the longest while, who could imagine taking an anything to an anything to an anywhere, and (by and by) who could imagine wanting to? How frightening to not know your home even a fraction as intimately as I know the wood grains of my desk at this point. What a relief to sit and write without FOMO. Moreover, as a back-to-back duo, these two songs are a “finish the damned thing already” suite, “Black Crow” the 11th-hour number where the tempo quickens (fingers obediently pound the keys), and “Blue Motel Room” the lazy croon that tells you to shut the laptop, time for brunch, right here in your very own kitchen, and aren’t you glad of that?
Lesson/Track 9 – Refuge of the Roads: Come back now, you hear?
Nope, wait. Editing. I always forget about the last-read-over before closing the document . . . just like I always forget this song. “Blue Motel Room” feels so conclusive. Like, for heaven’s sake, she is specifically singing to the man she is ending her trip for, and her last statement is, literally, “I’ll lay down the highway.” But no, we’re not done. That inspiration-length gallivant got you only to draft zero, and just as a grand tour finishes out with the re-packing, the car return, the check-in kiosks, so too does the writing end with the arduous are-we-home-yet details. Still, can’t we make the revision process as sensual, as transporting, as the writing itself? As Joni does her final recap of brief scenes (“some drifters,” “a highway service station,” “Dixie cold cuts,” and, of course and lastly, her “baggage overload”), we too can flick through the photo gallery from behind the viewfinder of our optic nerve and decide which pictures really and truly belong in the album.
Arden Levine is the author of Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Sixth Finch and other journals. She lives in New York City, where her daily work focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. www.ardenlevine.com
