Why "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" is Joni Mitchell's Best Album Ever

I delve into what's arguably Joni Mitchell's finest hour for its 50th anniversary.

This album review dissects the mystique and mastery of Joni Mitchell’s seminal 1975 release.

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Genre: Singer/Songwriter, Jazz Fusion, Experimental

Label: Asylum

Release Date: November 17, 1975

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

Sometimes you think you know what to expect from an artist. You’ve dabbled in their greatest hits playlist on whatever streaming platform. Maybe you’ve listened to an entire album or two and consider yourself a reasonably devout fan. You can’t go as deep as others can in the artist’s back catalog, but you can hang with the die-hards for at least a few minutes of conversation at a time. But then, out of nowhere, you put on a record of theirs that subverts any expectations you had in the best possible way. It opens your mind to who they really were as a creative voice, someone who may have sneakily been capable of a lot more than critics and consumers alike have historically given them credit for. If anything along those lines has ever happened to you, then you’ll know how I felt after hearing Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns for the first time.

It lets you think you know what you’re getting into during the first few minutes of the opener, “In France They Kiss on Main Street.” It sounds like it picks up right where Court and Spark, her runaway best-seller from the year before, had left off. The sunny strums of acoustic guitar and shimmering keyboards frame her voice with this effervescence that most people associate with her biggest pop crossovers, such as “Help Me” and “Big Yellow Taxi.” Right from the jump, Mitchell sounds supremely confident, an artist in complete control (and at the height) of her considerable powers. It’s a near-perfect rope-a-dope moment, then, when the first notes of “The Jungle Line” tumble out of your speakers. Built on a field recording of East African “warrior drums”, on top of which Mitchell dubs her vocals, guitar, and, more notably, crunchy Moog synthesizers, it has more in common with the American underground, which included the emerging sound of hip-hop, than her persona as America’s folk music sweetheart.

To say that critics and fans dismissed this record when it first came out would be to put it lightly. In his Rolling Stone review, Stephen Holden wrote that, “If The Hissing of Summer Lawns offers substantial literature, it is set to insubstantial music. There are no tunes to speak of […] Mitchell’s tunes for the first time often lack harmonic focus. They are free-form in the most self-indulgent sense, i.e., they exist only to carry the lyrics,” adding that several arrangements are as “pretentiously chic as they are boring.” In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau noted that “Mitchell’s transition from great songwriter to not-bad poet is meeting resistance from her talent and good sense, but I guess you can’t fight ‘progress.’” Like, what does that even mean? Wouldn’t her growth as a writer (she showcases some incredible chops throughout Hissing) be a showcase of her talent rather than flying in the face of it? Could it be that, because she dared to venture outside the box that most people wanted her to stay in creatively, critics who supposedly had “good sense” felt the need to put Dr. Evil air quotes around ideas like progress?

Ultimately, the fact that she pulled back the lacquer of Laurel Canyon self-mythology makes for a far more interesting, immersive listen than if she’d reinforced it with a carbon copy of Court and Spark. In an interview published in June 1979, Mitchel told Cameron Crowe that Hissing was a “suburban album,” consciously shifting her gaze to “social description” rather than the cutting personal confessionals she was better known for. “I met with a tremendous amount of resentment,” she said. “People thought suddenly that I was secure in my success, that I was being a snot and was attacking them. The basic theme of the album, which everybody thought was so abstract, was just any summer day in any neighborhood when people turn their sprinklers on all up and down the block. It’s just that hiss of suburbia.”

But even that doesn’t really do this album and, most of all, its songwriting, enough justice. For as soft a touch as most of the jazz-fusion instrumentals are throughout, this is a record full of dark, tense commentary, full of acute observations about how women operate within power structures that consistently try to silence them, and the unapologetic steps they must take to taste some version of freedom. On the scathing “Harry’s House / Centerpiece,” one of the best songs Mitchell has ever written, she skillfully skewers the gender roles that became much more challenging to escape as the United States plunged headlong into a sustained corporate boom. The further up that professional ladder Harry climbs, the more inert his wife becomes, trapped in “House and Gardens,” a nice play on words that evokes poisonous, idealized domesticity.

Passages like this, presenting deep-rooted anxiety as matter-of-fact reporting, are one of many examples of how Mitchell cuts through stereotypical BS with surgical precision.

Battalions of paper-minded males Talking commodities and sales While at home their paper wives and paper kids Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid

The same themes are presented in a much more visceral (and Biblical) sense on “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” a song stuffed with so many historical and philosophical references, you may need multiple listens to catch them all (I certainly did). At its core, it presents women as entities dismissed by and enslaved by the men in their lives. The second verse in particular is astonishing, a cry for help from within the patriarchy that’s been curdled by embittered resignation. “Wash my guilt of Eden,” she sings, referring to the notion that femininity is inherently corrupt because of Eve’s original sin and, as a result, cannot be trusted, justifying its subordination in the eyes of men. Clearly, Mitchell wasn’t having that narrative. Not one bit. “Anima rising, uprising in me tonight,” she continues, “she’s a vengeful little goddess with an ancient crown to fight.” With apologies to Christgau, I’ll classify that as extending far beyond “not-bad” poetry.

There are so many virtuoso moments on Hissing—so many brilliant, incisive depictions of social norms that we, unfortunately, haven’t been able to shake in the half-century since its initial release— that it would take several more hours to unpack every last detail. And, honestly, if you haven’t communed with this album before, it’s better to discover those intricacies for yourself instead of spoonfeeding them to you. That said, I do want to give a quick shout-out to my favorite moment on the entire LP, the magnificent closer, “Shadows and Light.” Though it consists mainly of layered vocal harmonies and elegiac synths, it’s a poignant, profound listening experience. The lyrics take aim at, essentially, the blind who lead the blind, those who become “judges in black and white.” “Compelled by prescribed standards or some ideals we fight, for wrong, wrong and right,” she sings towards the end, a somewhat obvious observation that hits on a much different level when you consider the otherworldly quality of the production.

In that same interview with Crowe, Mitchell called out the hypocrisy of the reaction to Hissing when it debuted, the first of several dominoes to fall in her rejection of the commercial appetites of what her music “should” sound like. “They were ready to get me; that’s the way I figure it,” she explained. “It was my second year in office. The cartoonists had their fun. There weren’t enough good jokes left, so it was time to throw me out of office and get a new president. It’s politics.” When asked if the reaction surprised her, you can almost hear the eye roll through the page:

It really surprised me. In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me at all. I listened to that album recently, ‘cause I was going to rework “Edith and the Kingpin.” I was surprised. I feel that the times have caught up with it. At that time, I was beginning to introduce - for lack of a better word—jazz overtones. Nobody was really doing that. In the two years that followed, it became more acceptable, and when Steely Dan finally made Aja, with some of the same sidemen, it was applauded as a great, if somewhat eccentric, work. I fail even to see the eccentricity of it, myself. Perhaps there was a weary tone in my voice that irritated people, but there was so much of it that was accessible.

A strong woman’s voice silenced because it didn’t fall in line with expectation … where have I heard that one before?

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What’s your favorite Joni Mitchell album? Give it some love in the comments.