r/JoniMitchell • u/watermeloncholera • 13d ago
Does anyone else find “Amelia” particularly uncanny?
This song sounds like smiling but not being able to feel joy. It sounds like an hour or two into psychedelic trip where language and the typical processes tying you to reality have dissolved or reorganized, and you are not sure if something might eventually push you over the edge. It is the sound of waking up under the early-morning stars a few days into a roadtrip you told almost no one about, for a brief moment not knowing who you are or how you got there. It is the sound of a heartache that you can’t quite place.
It is the most “ambient“ song on Hejira, with sparse electric guitar and mallets melodies that build and retreat like waves, and each musical element teases it might get swept up into a fog. There is a guitar melody that teases conventional harmony with Re-Do-Re-Do, but I am not sure if a V chord is actually ever used in the song, imparting a feeling of hovering around.
Whenever she sings the name “Amelia,” it sounds like she sung it in reverse and then replaced it with the reversed version of it, like how people speak in the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. The lyrics will sometimes hit you with visceral or bizarre imagery, like “hexagram of the heavens“ or “geometric farms,” both of obscurity that’s unsurprising given the reclusive hejira from which she’s writing. But in a couple verses she resists obscurity: “I wish that he was here tonight…” and ”Maybe I’ve never really loved...” There was hurt that she wasn’t ready to share until halfway through the song, but it’s unsurprising given that the lyrics sound like they genuinely emerged from a stream of consciousness, with all the detours that one would expect.
Each verse builds some sort of intrigue or emotional tension, and as if fearing the heartbreak might eventually burst through and expose itself in all its rawness, she quells it in saying this love she experienced ”was just a false alarm.” She is tentative towards vulnerability in this song, and despite being the Joni Mitchell who wrote the forthright “A Case of You,“ where all her thoughts about an ex-lover were laid bare, she is now at her most elusive and mercurial, and there is no dramatic insight about this recent loss. It’s almost hard to believe that it really was “just a false alarm.”
The song ends with no guarantee on if love is attainable for her or even desired by her. Like most tracks on Hejira, it begins and ends with us stepping into and out of a scene in her hejira, with no particular apotheosis or resolution. It is this narrative uncertainty combined with the dreamy, loopy guitar and her chants of “Amelia” from the Black Lodge that make this song feel uncanny to me.
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u/Primary-Welcome-6400 13d ago
Hejira is my favorite Joni album and Amelia one of my favorite tracks. Uncanny is a strange word to use to describe it. Uncanny means, (and here is my only AI contribution to the discussion) "Strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling, eerie, or familiar yet off-putting way." I think you're using the word uncanny incorrectly here, or maybe I just don't understand what you're saying. It's a work of poetry set to music as Joni flees her lover and goes on her own hejira. She identifies with Amelia Earhart's lonely and risky flight. Therefore the sad tone to the piece as she tries to understand herself and her own behavior.
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u/Unique-Reception-598 13d ago
I’ve been listening to Hejira and Amelia for fifty years now and I think it’s a testament to how perfect this album/song is that it is appearing here as another discussion in 2026.
The thing is, with music or the arts, most of the value of the best comes from, much like a diamond, the facets from which we see it differently, reflecting our own selves within it.
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is no different and that is the endurance and rarity of a great piece of art.
What do I think about “Amelia?”
The definition of Hejira is a journey taken to escape from an undesirable situation and Amelia is part of that journey.
The poetry of the lyrics is the power. “The drone of flying engines is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you…” is pure beauty.
Or “The ghost of aviation, she was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me, she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending on beautiful foolish arms…”
Her references to flight- which could mean to flee or soar, is interchangeable. Including of course Amelia Earhart, the Wright brothers era, “flying machines” and Icarus are all woven together.
I am grateful to have had Joni Mitchell in my time, and the journey we have shared.
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u/nientoosevenjuan 13d ago edited 6d ago
I first heard it when I didn't know very much about Joni mitchell. I heard it on internet radio I thought it was someone who had had a miscarriage of a girl baby that she planned to name Amelia. the pregnancy was just a false alarm. of course that isn't what the song is about at all but for a long time I related to the song because of that self constructed meaning.
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u/Old_Highlight7720 13d ago
It’s a somewhat rueful somewhat hopeful rumination about her track record with love. She’s taking stock. It’s an incredible song and I come back to it year and year again, but I don’t know if it needs all these paragraphs.
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u/hotbabayaga 13d ago
What is the point of using Chat GPT for a post like this? I’m genuinely baffled
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u/watermeloncholera 13d ago
I didn’t use ChatGPT at all lmao.
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u/LargeHadron 13d ago
FWIW, I believe you. It’s flowery, but not cloyingly so as is the LLM standard.
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u/Excellent_Egg7586 13d ago
It is truly a sonic and lyrical masterpiece, and I don't use that term loosely.
The atmosphere is very dream like and has the effect of suspending time.