Take the Soap out of the Wrapper

Listening to Demos

Arrival at Narita Airport

I’m back on the road for a couple weeks, in Japan for a reunion with our long-time comrade on electric guitar, Michio Kurihara. We will play two live shows in Tokyo together – you can join one virtually via livestream November 5 - and we will spend time in a studio working on new songs.

New songs means demos have been much on my mind (and on my iPhone). Demos can be fragmentary or complete, auditions or dress rehearsals, private or public – but whatever they were once, if the artist is famous enough they always seem to end up on a box set.

Volume 4 of Joni Mitchell’s Archive series is just out, and buried in the middle – on disc three out of six – are her demos from March 1976 of nine songs that landed on both Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. These were all recorded at A&M Studios and with a couple exceptions are entirely solo, just the singer and her guitar.

Tokyo morning view

Hejira is my favorite Joni Mitchell album, the settings of the songs never fail to intrigue me no matter how many times I’ve heard them. The band is skillful almost to a fault, but manage to use their chops to serve the songs rather than the other way round. And Jaco Pastorius’s tracks are thrilling, answering the vocal lines like a lyrical horn – Lester Young on electric bass.

I knew the demos of these songs would be an opportunity to hear them stripped of orchestration. What I didn’t anticipate was a lesson in lyric writing. But the opening line of the demo for “Amelia” took me aback:

“Take the soap out of the wrapper”

Take the soap out of the wrapper…? “Amelia” is a road song – among many by Joni Mitchell. But I’d never thought of this elegant meditation on Icarus, Amelia Erhardt, and the singer’s own wanderlust as literally starting in a motel shower. Where was “the hexagram of the heavens” I loved from the opening verse of the album?

Turns out Mitchell didn’t get to that remarkable line till the end of the demo. Her final version omits the motel soap altogether, but is otherwise a rearranged sequence of mostly the same verses. Still, the narrative feels completely changed as a result. Here is the demo lyric in full:

Amelia (demo version)

Take the soap out of the wrapper
And shower off the dust
And sleep on the strange pillows of your wanderlust
Dream of 747s
Over geometric farms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

The drone of a Rolls Royce engine
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Reeling from arms to arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

People tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have come to paradise
Others just come to harm
Amelia it was just a false alarm

I wish that he was here tonight
It's so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away
So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road winds cursed and charmed
I tell Amelia it was just a false alarm

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On his beautiful foolish arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

I was driving across a desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails above the bleak terrain
Like the hexagram of the heavens
Like the strings of my guitar
Amelia it was just a false alarm

And here is the revised album version:

Amelia (album version)

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
It was the strings of my guitar
Amelia it was just a false alarm

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets thru to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture post card charms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Oh, Amelia it was just a false alarm

I wish that he was here tonight
It's so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away
So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road leads cursed and charmed
I tell Amelia it was just a false alarm

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

Maybe I've never really loved
I guess that is the truth
I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust
I dreamed of 747s
Over geometric farms
Dreams Amelia - dreams and false alarms

The album version ends in the shower. But by the time we get there, we’ve been places with the singer. We start in the desert, staring at the sky – then soon ascend, staring back down at the earth. And there’s a crucial crash landing, the only new verse added since the demo:

Maybe I've never really loved
I guess that is the truth
I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm

It’s tempting to think of Joni Mitchell’s songs as effortless, because her style can imply that the lyrics spill out of her. I understand better now that she is also a great editor. Which should be encouraging to anyone listening back to their own demos, and wondering what to do about that dud of an opening line.

Listening to: Voice Memos

Cooking: New crop rice