Ellen Shaw

music theorist

Abstract
Joni Mitchell composed her eighth studio album, Hejira, from 1975–76 while on three road trips throughout North America. Fittingly for its nomadic genesis, Joni says of Hejira, “There is this restless feeling throughout it” (Hilburn 1996). Existing literature on Hejira has examined how this restlessness appears solely in its textual material, neglecting to investigate how these themes appear in the music itself. In this paper, I examine musical representations of restlessness, motion, and wandering in Hejira across three domains: 1) the poetry, 2) the melody’s flexible relationship with meter, and 3) the music’s flexible relationship with tonality. First, I examine how Joni’s vivid poetry ebbs and flows between reflecting and describing, revealing her positioning as a woman in the 70s, teetering restlessly between her autonomy and the gendered expectations placed onto her. Then, by drawing on BaileyShea’s (2014) and Murphy’s (2023) discussions on intimacy in popular music, I examine how the listener is drawn into the narrative of Hejira, positioned not as a bystander but as an active participant. Next, I establish how the metric and tonal structures of Hejira form a reciprocal relationship with this lyrical content. I explore Joni’s novel use of flexible meter (Murphy 2023) in her melodic structures despite her instrumentation’s grounding in metric regularity. I evaluate how this metric structure denies listener expectations, compounding the sense of restlessness. Finally, I define the term “flexible tonality” and examine how it manifests through Joni’s malleable tonal structures, either in the form of shifting between various key centers, or in the form of a tonally avoidant melody, both of which make the respective tonal center and sense of resolution difficult to identify. 

© 2026 Ellen Shaw
Last updated: June 2026