Sound and Vision
Maybe for you it was the old man with the bundle of sticks on his back, or the monkey with the halo and the floating numbers, or the two businessmen, one on fire, shaking hands. For me it was the woman on the frozen pond.
I looked at the cover of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira a lot when I was sixteen years old—this was in the mid-1980s, a decade after the album came out. It wasn’t the portrait of the singer on the front that so fascinated me, although her broad, triangular silhouette is what now comes to mind when I think of the album—has, in fact, become shorthand in my memory for all the music I