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Date Posted: 16:48:43 11/05/07 Mon
In reply to:
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's message, "Joni's Sechelt renaissance article:" on 16:02:08 11/05/07 Mon
It was just such a moment, combining her love of the natural
world with a sense of earthy pleasure, that inspired her first musical composition in over ten years. Mitchell had retreated from Los Angeles to her isolated estate near Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast (bought in 1096, in the first flush of fame).
"It's a beautiful place of great complexitiy and mood. It doesn't take very long to get my centre back when I go up there. To simplify.
Because cities are so complicated, and our business is so complicated, being a public person is difficult at anytime, but especially at this time when everything is vicious and distorted."
With her fine wrinkles and silvery blonde hair, Mitchell exhibits the elegant poise of an old hippie sage, yet gets almost girlishly giddy as she speaks. She talks excitedly about standing on a rock, the Pacific Ocean, rolling towards her, seals on the kelp, a heron crossing the sky, smoke undoubtedly filling her lungs, when she felt "such a sense of gratitude for having this place to recharge my spirit."
She walked to her house,sat down at the piano and started to play.
Strangely, for someone celebrated as one of pop music's most profound lyricists, the first piece was an instrumental, entitled "One Week Last Summer."
"I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
I blocked myself. All I had written was one haiku in ten years."
In her own mind, at least, Mitchell had quietly retired from the music business, "just slipped away. My life came down to being a granny and watching alot of television."
But, almost unbidden, the songs started coming, until it
turned into quite a torrent of work.
Earlier this year, shhe collaborated with Canadian choreographer Jean Grande-Maitre on a ballet, The Fiddle And The Drum. A prolific and much admired painter, Mitchell has a new exhibitionin New York of photographic triptychs, entitled Green Flag Song. And she has just released her twentieth studio album, SHINE (on Hear Music, the Starbucks label).
The thing that links all of the pieces is a fale-force political anger.
"I spent the last couple of years pissed off," she laughs. "I was mad at America, mad at the government, mad at the people for not doing something about it. They were going to be so quick to impeach Clinton for kinky sex but slow to do something about Bush and his Naxi stormtroopers."
While the ballet and art exhibition focus on war, the lyrics of Shine pick up from her '60's classic "Big Yellow Taxi" (included in a revamped version) on environmental concerns.
"I wasn't interested in escapist entertainment when the planet's on red alert. We're busy wasting our time on this fairytale war when nobody is fighting for God's creation.
In 2005, she was asked to contribute to Starbucks' Artist Choice compilation series, and took six months listening to everything that had ever moved her. "Starbucks kept calling upL "Why are you taking so long? Everybody else made a list and took the cheque." But this was one of those life-and-death matters. I thought, "If I can get this right and remember why I loved music so much, I might have another record in me."
Shine is an album of gentle poer, with strength in depth. It concludes with a musical interpretation of Rudyard Kipling's classic "IF."
"It gives me optimism. It's a good grocery list, very difficult to live up to. The thing about hsi album is that you can;t really change the world.
The only thing you can do is work on yourself."
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