Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns

The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is the seventh studio album by artist and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, originally released in November 1975 via Asylum Records.

Joni Mitchell writes of the album on her website "This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally - as a whole. The performances were guided by the given compositional structures and the audibly inspired beauty of every player. The whole unfolded like a mystery." 

The first track, "In France They Kiss on Main Street", is a jazz-rock song about coming of age in a small town in the 1950s rock & roll era.

"The Jungle Line" uses a field recording from Africa of the Drummers of Burundi (called 'warrior drums' in the credits), onto which are dubbed guitar, Moog synthesizer and the vocal line. The lyrics pay homage to the works of the French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau. Mitchell blends details of his works with imagery of modern city life, the music industry and the underground drug culture.

"Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" is an acoustic guitar–based song with stream-of-consciousness lyrics, focused on women standing up to male dominance and proclaiming their own existence as individuals.

"Shades of Scarlett Conquering" is an orchestral-based piece about a southern belle, presumably the Scarlett O'Hara character from Gone with the Wind.

The title track, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", is about a woman who is treated as part of her husband's portfolio, with a central image of the lawn sprinklers hissing their disapproval of the materialistic culture of the houses or perhaps the hiss of the snake that appears on the cover.

The African theme of "The Jungle Line" also features on the album sleeve, with an image of natives carrying a large snake.  Both men and snake are superimposed on the Beverly Hills suburbs, with Mitchell's own house marked in colour on the back cover.

The record's reputation has grown in stature and has been called Mitchell's masterpiece.  In 1977, at the 19th Grammy Awards, Mitchell was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the album.

This album is a 2023 repress on 180 gram black vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with remastered audio, pressed in Europe via Asylum Records.