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By which I do not mean, nobody other than Joni Mitchell, although that is also true. Rather that, between the times I listen to it, it ceases to be what it is when I play it - as if it were one of those quantum particles whose state is defined only when observed. I can never remember exactly what it’s like, between those plays. I have a sense of it. I think I know it. But I hear it again and realise I don’t, until it’s in the room with me.

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In that, and many other ways, it’s qualitatively different from the folk-pop records which made Mitchell’s name. Most of those are brilliant, so far the best thing of their kind that it is apt they are also the progenitors of most things of their kind. Their shape is clear and their substance certain. Like figurative art, which is what they are, they are still there when you turn away. It is on this album that Mitchell becomes truly and sublimely elusive - a kind of protean fire sprite flickering like hungry light through her own music. Nobody has ever made an album like this; although plenty must have tried and no doubt some of them have done remarkable yet different things in the attempt.

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It doesn’t really matter whether The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is Mitchell’s best album. What does matter is that anyone who thrills to, say, Blue, as well they might, may find this even more thrilling if they’ve yet to hear it. Mitchell is unusual among major artists in that little of her very finest work is among her most famous, with the possible exception of this album’s predecessor, Court And Spark. Hejira, the magnificent record that followed it, is stranger, more exotic, more thickly draped in mysteries. – The Quietus