Joni Mitchell HEJIRA Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc One-Step 45rpm w/o jacket/box EXC

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Joni Mitchell HEJIRA Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab UltraDisc One-Step 45rpm w/o jacket EXCELLENT

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• Copyright © – Asylum Records
• Manufactured For – Rhino Entertainment Company
• Record Company – Warner Music Group
• Recorded At – A&M Studios
• Mastered At – Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab
• Plated At – Record Technology Incorporated
• Lacquer Cut At – Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab
• Pressed By – Fidelity Record Pressing

• Lacquer Cut By – KW
• Mastered By – Krieg Wunderlich
• Mixed By – Lewy, Mitchell
• Music Director [Musical Director] – Mitchell
• Recorded By – Henry "Inspirational" Lewy
• Recorded By [Assisted By] – Steve Katz
• Songwriter [All Songs By] – Joni Mitchell

• Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, variant 2): UD1S 2-053 A1 45309.1(1)... FRP
• Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, variant 2): UD1S 2-053 B2 FRP KW at MoFi 46137.2(1)...
• Matrix / Runout (Side C runout, variant 2): UD1S 2-053 C1 FRP KW at MoFi 45309.3(1)...
• Matrix / Runout (Side D runout, variant 2): UD1S 2-053 D1 FRP KW at MoFi 45309.4(1)...

Joni Mitchell — Hejira

180-gram 45 RPM 2LP UltraDisc One-Step Pressing

1/4" 15 ips Dolby A analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe

Limited to 3,000 copies

Pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing

Joni Mitchell embarks on open-ended journeys and chronicles restlessness with Hejira

Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time — No. 133/500!

     Joni Mitchell is the only artist who could've made Hejira. The legendary singer-songwriter said as much when discussing the album decades after its release. Yet that fact seemed obvious from the moment the gold-certified effort streeted in fall 1976. An adventurous travelogue, probing narrative, and offbeat homage to freedom, Hejira remains an inimitable entry in the catalog of recorded music — a spare, gorgeous, meditative series of sonic vignettes comprised of floating harmonic pop, cool jazz, soft rock, and sensitive vocal elements that beckon feelings of motion, discovery, and self-examination.

     Sourced from the original analog master tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing. Strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180-gram 45 RPM 2LP set presents the record ranked the 133rd Greatest of All Time by Rolling Stone with definitive detail, richness, accuracy, and directness. Marking the first time the revered LP has received audiophile treatment, it's one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on vinyl and SACD.

     Playing with a virtually nonexistent noise floor, dead-quiet surfaces, and superior groove definition, this collectible reissue reproduces in enveloping fashion the tones, textures, and craftsmanship that help Hejira function as the equivalent of a liberating trip down an open road with nothing but blue sky, natural landscape, and fresh air in the immediate vicinity. Passages bloom, carry, decay as they do amid an acoustically optimized environment. Soundstages extend far, wide, and deep, with black backgrounds and pinpoint images adding to the realism.

     The reference-grade immediacy, airiness, and presence put in transparent perspective Mitchell's dense strings of words, stream-of-conscious-like phrasing, and unhurried albeit forward momentum. Likewise, the instrumental contributions of her A-list support musicians — a cast that includes L.A. Express members John Guerin, Max Bennett and Tom Scott, plus Neil Young, Victor Feldman, and Abe Most — emerges with breathtaking clarity and dimensionality.

     While Mitchell, whose intimate vocals and abstract guitar parts center everything, Mobile Fidelity's restoration of Hejira further reveals the visionary breadth of guitarist Larry Carlton and bassist Jaco Pastorius. Though heard on only four tracks, Pastorius' fretless bass epitomizes the fluid, subtle, flexible, roomy, and shape-shifting characteristics of songs that often appear to transpire out of nowhere akin to the formation of a puffy cumulus cloud overhead. In sync with Mitchell's voice, Pastorius' fusion hovers and floats, suspended in a fog you want to deeply inhale. The "grace notes" Mitchell desired on Hejira can now be heard in full. Ditto the luxurious tapestries of alinear lines, fills, and supplements unreeled on Carlton's six-string.

     This version is for listeners who desire to become immersed in everything about Hejira. The notion of skating, feeling an awakening wind whipping against your face, and losing yourself to the surroundings are extremely apt for Hejira, which Mitchell wrote after a sequence of trips and relationships prompted her to reflect on the complicated conflicts between independence and marriage, success and satisfaction, duty and desire — and, more specifically, "the cost of being a woman." The Canadian native delved into such themes before. But never as she does on Hejira, whose liberating, running-away aura doubles as another of Mitchell's rejections of tradition as well as a suggestion of a better alternative.

     At once observational and personal, expansive and insular, cheerful and poignant, Hejira spans a sea of human conditions, emotions, and circumstances. It addresses drifting, isolation, pleasure, place, time, and surroundings with strikingly poetic discourse matched with music that, save for the crooned ballad "Blue Motel Room," forgoes conventional structures and choruses.

     The jazz-based arrangements, marked by scaled-down percussion and all manner of bent, rounded, and unsettled notes, hint that Mitchell has no exact destination in mind. Excursions such as the moody "Furry Sings the Blues," funky "Coyote" and edgy "Black Crow" throw open previously locked doors to possibility and journey. They signal it's time for a welcome departure from norms and the past, one that leads to a heightened sense of clarity and perspective. Or, as Mitchell said upon choosing the album title, it's time for "leaving the dream, no blame."