"Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones"
Joni’s writing has quite a few references to strangers; unlike the Doors’
"People Are Strange", which casts the narrator/singer as the stranger, Joni almost
always casts others as the stranger in her songs. The above reference, from Hejira, is
almost identical to her description in "Down to You":
"In the morning there are lovers in the street
They look so high
You brush against a stranger
And you both apologize"
Where the intervention of a stranger, representing the unknown, interrupts an
isolation but still registers an emotion. In the former, the stranger’s touch
chills the bones and in the second the brush elicits a spoken response, albeit a
spontaneous reaction ("Sorry") as opposed to a trembling in the bones. Perhaps Joni is
saying that our reaction to strangers is based on our openness to the experience?
"Now your kids are coming up straight
And my child's a stranger
I bore her
But I could not raise her"
Perhaps Joni’s saddest lyric ever – the postscript to "Little Green, have
a happy ending", describing her own child as a stranger, and directly opposite to her
fantasy of "Morning Morgantown" where she and (supposedly) her child are enjoying a
mother-daughter day with pleasantries like:
"We'll wink at total strangers passing
In morning Morgantown"
Which is certainly a prettier picture, sharing a moment with someone and feeling SO
confident and self-assured that you can wink at strangers with a smile. The idea that
strangers are much less imposing when you don’t feel like one yourself. Much
nicer than the blues of "California", where she laments:
"Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers"
Once again, she writes of passing strangers on the street, although there is not even
the brushing up going on…even though we personally may not yearn to return to
the West Coast, Joni does a good job of describing that feeling where you feel like
the only person around who doesn’t know anyone, a similar isolation to being at
the party and fumbling deaf dumb and blind, where people are strange, when
you’re a stranger.
But would she (or we) prefer to follow an impulse and react to that "Hejira"
trembling? In "Carnival in Kenora", she finds a friend, perhaps after a wink:
"Now a stranger takes my hand; we smile
And the magic understands"
And sometimes the reflection of the interaction with a stranger is not as innocent &
pleasing. Sometimes strangers remain strangers, no matter how intimate we push the
relationship:
"Drive your bargains
Push your papers
Win your medals
Fuck your strangers
Don't it leave you on the empty side"
Which begs the question…can we really ever KNOW another person? Do even our
closest relationships remain "strangers" in a sense? It’s not clear whether Joni
is writing about a one-night stand in the above lyric from WOHAM or whether
she’s stating that anyone you become intimate with is potentially a stranger.
And then too, Joni casts herself as the stranger in "The Silky Veils of Ardor":
"I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through all these highs and lows"
With a lyric that could have been the opening line to Hejira and it’s songs of
travel and searching and love and its peaks and valleys. Ultimately perhaps, we are
all strangers, to each other and even sometimes to ourselves. Ever look in the mirror
and wonder who it is that you're looking at?
The role of the stranger is a theme that Joni seems fascinated with, taking it's roots
in her earliest and unreleased songs, and threading throughout her work...even in
other's writing; her latest album begs her lover,
"Don't go to strangers, darling come to me"
Bob
NP: Jane's Addiction, "Sympathy For The Devil"
