…Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that rock album art gave generations of suburban adolescents in the 1970s and ’80s their first exposure to surrealism and open-ended narrative? The cover of Hejira presented the lightly cultured teenager I was then with a visual puzzle that absorbed me in a new way. On the front gatefold, Mitchell’s body is double-exposed with an image of a prairie highway; the songs on the album are about travel. I wanted to know, though, about the wintry sepia landscape in the background. The photograph winds around to the back of the sleeve, where an iced-over lake encircled with forest seems to extend without limit. Like the intricate, hobbity landscapes glimpsed in the background windows of Memling portraits, this was space I could mentally circumnavigate. A male figure skater in a flowery one-piece suit and a woman in a wedding dress pose in the center of the pond; far in the distance, on the horizon, is some tiny thing I’ve never been able to identify, no bigger than a mosquito’s wing but with three discernible parts. Possibly people; for some reason, I told myself they were three magi. A song on the album was about marriage and mentioned ice skaters, but it seemed too flattening to view the back cover as a literal interpretation of a lyric. I imagined some deeper, more mysterious interaction between the various figures, but I was happy to let their relationship remain a question mark.–Peter Terzian in Bookforum
