The Hissing of Summer Lawns is the seventh studio album by the Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, released in November 1975 on Asylum Records.

It features synthesizers such as the Moog and ARP, sampling, backing from the jazz-rock groups the L.A. Express and the Jazz Crusaders, and contributions from James Taylor, David Crosby, and Graham Nash.

It depicts a painting of a group of men carrying a large snake superimposed over the Beverly Hills suburbs; Mitchell's house is shaded in blue.

[6] On "The Jungle Line", Mitchell is credited with the first commercially released song to include a sample, featuring a looped recording of percussion by the African ensemble the Drummers of Burundi.

I felt like there was a black poet trapped inside me, and that song was about Harlem—the primitive juxtaposed against the Frankenstein of modern industrialization; the wheels turning and the gears grinding and the beboppers with the junky spit running down their trumpets.

"[8] The first track, "In France They Kiss on Main Street", is a jazz-rock song about coming of age in a small town in the 1950s rock & roll era.

"Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" is an acoustic guitar-based song with stream-of-consciousness lyrics, focused on women standing up to male dominance and proclaiming their own existence as individuals.

The second side begins with the title track, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", which is about a woman who chooses to stay in a marriage where she is treated as part of her husband's portfolio.

"Sweet Bird" is a sparser acoustic track that is a slight return to Mitchell's so-called 'confessional' singer-songwriter style and addresses the loss of beauty power with ageing.

The final track is "Shadows and Light", consisting of many overdubs of her voice and an ARP String Machine (credited as an ARP-Farfisa on the album sleeve).

Music writer Howard Sounes has called The Hissing of Summer Lawns Mitchell's masterpiece, "an LP to stand alongside Blood on the Tracks".