Just in time to make everybody’s year-end Top 10 lists came two of pop music’s certified blue-chippers recently with new albums, records at the very top of their craft. Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” and Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender” are both products of singer/songwriters who are reaching further than ever, in different directions. Both are superb, though each testifies to the growing absurdity that the label “pop” has become: there is simply no common ground for discussion of either in the same musical milieu as Led Zeppelin, pop’s most popular group.

Mitchell’s “Hejira” (Asylum 7E-1087) has nothing at all to do with rock, and precious little with Mitchell’s one-time roots in folk, either. It is a jazz record of considerable intensity, seemingly off-handed skill and amazing richness. It is a record that grows with re-hearings, drags its audience into the singer’s personna [sic] for intimate talks only to send it packing again with passages that are nearly impenetrable.

IN SHORT, it is the record we should have known Mitchell would make, having heard the first rattlings in “Court and Spark” and the fullscale move to jazz of “Hissing of Summer Lawns.” The latter remains in some ways that artist’s least “accessible,” in the argot of these things; “Hejira,” its giveaway title and all, at least offers a window on her intent.

This time we are party to a Joni Mitchell who has traveled too long, who is by turns tired and restless for more, looking forward and back but throughout on some sort of terms with her own craziness. She feels, she confides, like a black crow – and she’s decked herself out inside the album cover very much like some great, flapping bird, on ice skates no less – but she is singing paeans to Amelia Earhart, too, along with the laments for lost lovers.

THERE IS in the title song and in “Blue Motel Room” a feeling for her self-described “shell shock,” but in the LP’s masterpiece, “Song for Sharon,” comes the essence: “Well there’s a wide wide world of noble causes / And lovely landscapes to discover / But all I really want to do right now / Is … find another lover!”

For all her lyrical brilliance, however, it is again her voice – apparently still growing in range – that propels “Hejira” to its musical high velocity. Joni Mitchell’s best album? It is impossible to say, for she is singing something very different these days than in “Ladies of the Canyon.” But it is clear that this is the best work by a woman singer/songwriter of this year.

Perhaps then we can just elect Mitchell and Jackson Browne King and Queen of the Prom, for Browne’s “Pretender” (Asylum 7E-1079) looks like just the album to take the silly posings out of the Los Angeles/ersatz outlaw/desperadoes-in-limosine [sic] scene. With his old friend Warren Zevon coming in with ironic lampoons from the left and Browne finding some perspective – and some vocal punch – on the right, pop may have passed its New-West-mythic stage relatively painlessly. Certainly “The Pretender” will help, and certainly Jackson Browne has again laid claim to leadership among his singer/songwriter peers.

UNLIKE Neil Young, whose most evocative recent work (“Tonight’s the Night”) dripped the singer’s anguish like acid, Browne has found a balance in his work. Always the romantic, and too often the slightly schmaltzy one, his lyrics now show tempering.

Not that he’s all that happy about it: there is plain bitterness in the title song’s intentions: “I’m going to be a happy idiot / And struggle for the legal tender.” But there’s a wistful measure of resolve, a weathered wish for survival, in “The Fuse.” And there’s something else there as well.

Perhaps it is the work of producer Jon Landau (the man who – once – made the world safe for Bruce Springsteen), perhaps it is just Browne’s own evolution. Whatever, there is a punch and snap to the voice that years ago might have made Jackson Browne a rock ‘n’ roll singer. Since it is clearly too late for that now – neither Browne’s ballads nor his higher-kicking stuff is as close to rock as it is to simple, high-grade pop – we can simply revel in the results, that much the better for it.

ONCE AMONG pop music’s most curiously inflated figures (it is hard to forgive the rhyming of “Winslow, Arizona” with “Standin’ on the Corner,” much less the commission of a lyric like “Runnin’ down the road / Tryin’ to loosen my load”), Browne is heir to the worst of the L.A.-singer syndrome, but looks about ready to dignify the whole scene again.

And though he’s still concerned with finding the perfect woman and cutting the perfectly romantic figure, Browne has found words and music to relate his quests to people beyond what Zevon calls the “Desperadoes under the eaves.” The man who once released an album entitled “For Everyman” has finally created one to match that title. He’s got a word or two for each of us. And it sure sounds good.