I’ve always had mixed feelings about Joni Mitchell, a greatly gifted artist to whom I no longer warm, in part because of her self-absorption and humorlessness. (The older I get, the more distance I try to put between myself and anyone who lacks a sense of humor.) Yet once in a while a song of hers bobs to the surface of my consciousness–usually because somebody else is singing it–and I remember why I used to spend hours and hours listening to her music, back when the world was young.
I mention this because a jazz musician I know has been singing “Black Crow” (from Hejira), and now I can’t get its angular tune and strangely off-center harmonies out of my head:
There’s a crow flying
Black and ragged
Tree to tree
He’s black as the highway that’s leading me
Now he’s diving down
To pick up on something shiny
I feel like that black crow
Flying
In a blue sky
I took a 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 going to know my home
When I see it again
I’m like a black crow flying
In a blue, blue sky
I love the Great American Songbook with all my heart–and yet there are so many other songs that long to be played and sung. This is one of them.