A Good Listen

I tend to blather on a bit about the skill of listening at work but remain acutely aware of my own deficiencies in this area. This has been brought home to me over the last few days in relation to an album by the wonderful Joni Mitchell.

The first song I heard from her 1976 collection Hejira was Coyote, which immediately struck me as typically brilliant, and I knew the album had garnered excellent reviews. However, it was quite a few years before I heard Hejira in full, which was when I brought it as a CD. (Back in 1976 I just couldn't afford to buy that many records and generally listening to Joni involved borrowing from someone else.) The funny thing is that when I finally owned the album I found I couldn't get that deeply into it. I loved the second track Amelia, but nothing else really hit me, though the whole undoubtedly sounded pleasant.

Of course, I gave the CD a reasonable airing over the years but tended to zone out after the third track, Furry Sings the Blues. I suppose I thought of the songs that followed as being a bit 'samey'. So it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised that one of the best songs off Diana Krall's The Girl in the Other Room - an album I very much like - was, in fact, a song from Hejira. But when I played Black Crow as performed by Joni I sort of preferred Ms Krall's version.

All this has just changed. I finally sat down some four days back and made myself listen to the final four tracks from Hejira, with the lyrics in front of me for added focus, and realised just how marvellously, stupidly wrong I'd been for decades. The variation of form was startlingly obvious. The next day I played the central songs, A Strange Boy and Hejira, and again was blown away. I have no explanation of why I didn't listen appropriately before - but I tentatively wonder whether my omission was related to gender. Perhaps I just didn't enter sufficiently into the perspective of the songs.