There are albums that define a moment, and then there are albums that define an artist. Joni Mitchell’s seventh studio record, ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, released in November 1975, is firmly in the second category — and then some. This is the record where Mitchell stopped caring what you thought and started making music entirely on her own terms. It marked her official departure from the mainstream, the beginning of her jazzbo journey, and the work of an artist so absolutely assured of herself that she didn’t bother to leave a map for anyone trying to follow. It doesn’t carry the rhapsodic reputation of ‘Blue’, but it is unquestionably one of her finest albums — and almost certainly her most timeless. Fifty years on, here are five things you might not know about it.
It Contains One of the First Commercially Released Sampled Records in History
Long before hip-hop made sampling a cultural institution, Joni Mitchell was looping tribal percussion on “The Jungle Line.” She took a field recording of the Royal Drummers of Burundi, built it into a repeating loop, and ran her Moog synthesizer and vocal over top of it — creating something that had genuinely never been heard before on a major label release. Music historians now point to it as a landmark moment, a full decade before sampling became a defining feature of popular music.
Prince Called It “The Last Album I Loved All the Way Through”
Prince was famously particular about music — his own and everyone else’s. So when he singled out ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ as the last album he loved completely from beginning to end, that meant something. He praised it repeatedly in interviews over the years, and the record’s influence can be heard in his own restless refusal to stay in one genre. High praise from one of the most musically demanding artists who ever lived.
Critics Savaged It on Release — and Completely Reversed Course Later
When ‘Hissing’ dropped, reviewers were genuinely baffled and often hostile. Rolling Stone called it “a great collection of pop poems with a distracting soundtrack.” Robert Christgau praised Mitchell’s ambition while taking issue with her choice of session musicians. Fans who had been shouting for “Big Yellow Taxi” felt abandoned. The album still went gold and earned Mitchell a Grammy nomination, but the critical consensus was that she had lost the plot. Today, Pitchfork has given it a perfect 10, and music writer Howard Sounes has called it her masterpiece — worthy of standing alongside Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’.
It Is a Deeply Feminist Album Disguised as a Jazz Record
On the surface, ‘Hissing’ sounds like an elegant, jazz-inflected art-pop record. Underneath, it is a sharp and unflinching reckoning with what women of Mitchell’s generation were told their lives should look like. On “Harry’s House,” wives paper over their real feelings to maintain domestic peace. On “Sweet Bird,” beauty and youth are currencies that expire. On “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” women claim their right to exist as individuals. Mitchell and her peers had been raised to believe that marriage and domesticity would fulfill them entirely — ‘Hissing’ was her answer to that lie, delivered with jazz chords and devastating precision.
It Was Mitchell’s Last Top-10 Album — and She Didn’t Care
‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ reached number 4 on the Billboard 200, making it Mitchell’s last album to crack the top 10 in the United States. Rather than course-correcting to win her audience back, she responded by making ‘Hejira’, which was even more experimental, followed by the double album ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’, and then her full-blown collaboration with jazz legend Charles Mingus. Mitchell had never made a record that wasn’t bigger than the one before, and the audience’s rejection stung — but she was never going to reel anyone back in by retreating. That Joni didn’t live here anymore. ‘Hissing’ was the proof.
