How Singapore helped me love Joni Mitchell (more than I already did)

One of the sweetest memories from my earliest days in Singapore involved finding a connection to my Canadian heritage in the room where I first stayed.

Having landed in Singapore on a friend’s invitation, I arrived at the family estate and was shown my way to the room of my host’s brother. The absent family member, working abroad, left behind enough personal effects to give my lodging a refined sense of home. This was no mere guest room.

The ledge that lined up alongside the bed held books, family portraits and personal photos; the shelf above the desk stacked with cassettes and CDs and musty issues of Vogue going back through the 1980s, all of which imbued a bit of the personality of the missing tenant. To this day, he’s the only member of the family I haven’t met, but I’m grateful to him for the room and the chi he left behind. For my first taste of a new country, feeling the surroundings in a local home was impressionable.

This was my first afternoon in Singapore, fresh off an 18-hour journey and a taxi from the airport. I’d barely unpacked when I found a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira among the compact discs. Nothing should have been surprising about it, but it did seem out of place to the child in me – the child who grew up in the frozen Toronto winters, hearing Joni’s tunes drift out of my sister’s room on a winter’s afternoon, thinking of the singer as a distinct personification of Canada.

The Canada of my youth, from my perspective in suburban Toronto, was still just an idea – the loneliness of the prairies, the mountain towns of the Rockies, skating on a river at Christmastime, tapping a maple tree in a snowy forest. For most Canadians, those of us who lived in cities rather than the towns and villages of our folklore, it was a country more evoked than seen. It was our artists more than our experiences that gave us our sense of place: the Group of Seven painters, authors like Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, CBC nature documentaries, the poetry of Pauline Johnson… and our singers, foremost among them Joni Mitchell.

Now, to imagine the Peranakan descendants of Chinese emigrants having their imaginations touched by the same soundtrack to my own snow-covered Canadian childhood, it was all so contrary.

I slipped the CD into the multi-disc player and listened to Hejira for the first time. Blue, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns; those albums I knew. This one, though, was not one of the Joni Mitchell records in my sister’s collection all those years ago. Hearing it for the first time so far from the landscape it depicted – the coyotes and motel rooms and seedy jazz bars and the long lonely roads stretching across a frozen prairie – it was as all so incongruous with the heavy tropical air and the cicadas whistling outside the window.

Hejira provided a pleasant solace during the vacation, in those quiet moments between making plans and doing them. What was special was how the album brought back memories as if it had always been part of the backdrop to my own childhood, as if it had been something heard a hundred times before. It became a little slice of home to comfort me throughout the day. Yet, despite how unmistakably Canadian this music is, it eventually impressed upon my memory the humid, languid days among the colonial shophouses and tropical greenery of Singapore. 

Today it wells up a melange of emotions and memories from both my Canadian childhood and my Singaporean adventures. As someone who is often guided (and misguided) by emotion, the sound of mid-1970s Joni Mitchell records now cross the wires of reminiscence, calling me to return "home" to a Singaporean childhood that exists in a false memory, a time of my life that I can sense, even though it never existed.

I will always treasure the way Hejira conjures impressions of the endless cycle of hot days and warm nights that were unconstrained by seasons; the palm trees and the pool outside the window; the sound of Joni singing about the Bay of Fundy and the “refuge of the roads”, with her voice echoing through the large but modestly furnished room, surrounded by foreign books and faded photos of the Peranakan relatives.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that Hejira has almost no percussion. Its beauty and passion emerges simply from layered, jazzy guitars and a melodic bass. What a peculiar soundtrack to a Southeast Asian holiday. But then, maybe certain lyrics called out to me, foreshadowing the life that this impressionistic vacation would inspire me to follow:

The drone of flying engines is a song so wild and blue

It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you.

Then your life becomes a travelogue of picture-postcard charms…

People will tell you where they’ve gone, they’ll tell you where to go

But until you get there yourself you’ll never really know.