Joni Mitchell on "Amelia"

AMELIA (1976)

That's a good choice. To me, the whole "Hejira" album was really inspired. I feel a lot of people could have written "Chelsea Morning," but I don't think anyone else could have written the songs on "Hejira." I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it. . . . The sweet loneliness of solitary travel. What happened was I had driven across the country with a couple of friends, starting in California when they showed up at my door. One was an old boyfriend from Australia who had a 20-day visa and wanted to go to Maine to kidnap his daughter from this grandmother. You could have made a whole movie about that trip. "Refugee of the Roads" grew out of that experience. On the way back, I went down the coast to Florida and then followed the Gulf of Mexico across the country, staying in old '50s motels and eating at health food stores. In this song, I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another, . . . sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.