Shine [CD]

A while back, Joni Mitchell announced her retirement. She'd found and become reconciled with the long-lost daughter she'd given up for adoption in the 60s, and had no more need to run the gauntlet of a corrupt music industry for the sake of writing songs. The composer of "Both Sides Now", "Woodstock" and "Hejira" fell silent.

However, her seclusion didn't last. As she told a recent interviewer, ""I tried to keep my legs crossed, but it didn't work." Enter an unlikely ally in the form of multinational coffee chain Starbucks, whose Hear Music label has recently tempted other ancient luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan into signing new album deals. The result is Shine, the delayed follow-up to 1998's "Taming the Tiger".

The album begins wordlessly. "One Week Last Summer" is an instrumental evocation of a numinous time when "the piano beckoned for the first time in ten years". But when the songs proper begin, Mitchell's words can still bite - "money makes the trees come down/it turns mountains into molehills".

There's little of the old romantic confessional in these songs of later life. Instead, she's decided to "put some time into ecology", as she hinted she might so long ago in 1976's "Song For Sharon". Like the wordless movie Koyaanasqatsi, "Shine" is a chronicle of a world out of balance: a world where technology threatens to vanquish nature, where "cellphone zombies babble through the shopping malls", where we are all but consumed in "the jaws of our machines". For Mitchell, we live on a planet we are slowly poisoning, and in "Bad Dreams" she expresses her deepening disgust in the vocabulary of a modern plague: "we live in these electric scabs, these lesions once were lakes". There's even a reworking of "Big Yellow Taxi", her 1970 warning against environmental catastrophe.

As always, her lyrics can read badly off the page but make sense in terms of a kind of musical conversation as soon as she scoops them up inside that voice. It's still the elastic instrument it always was, although its youthful purity has been roughened and aged by tobacco.

Her melodies are the strange and rambling things they always were, guided by her own individual logic: this time she's chosen to do all the arrangements herself, with just a little instrumental help from her friends - including ex-lovers James Taylor and Larry Klein. There's an endearingly eccentric (or is it ironic?) touch in her use of a drum machine which sounds as though it came out of the same technological ark as Atari and Space Invaders, but in her hands it somehow works. Such are mavericks.

Shine isn't perfection. "Night Of The Iguana"'s Latino jazz is a little too coffee-table and there are rambling moments elsewhere. High points include "Shine", the deeply compassionate title track, and "Strong and Wrong" - a wry, punning comment on conflicts such as Iraq. "Men love war/that's what history's for/a mass-murder mystery/his story"

All in all, though, this is a moving, subtle and clear-sighted piece of work. Mitchell remains thoroughly true to her past; still a lady of the canyon. If it takes the multinational coffee dollars of Starbucks to bring us integrity in these less than innocent days, well, then, so be it.

The sparse, poetic, beautiful 'Shine' is Joni Mitchell's first album of new songs in almost a decade, and it does not disappoint.

Lyrically she is, as always, completely self-assured, the new songs ranking alongside such mid-1970's classics as 'Court and Spark' and 'Hejira', although the themes are very different; most of the songs here focus on environmental and political issues rather than the search for love. One of my favourite lyrics is from the title track:

'Shine on the pioneers
Those seekers of mental health
Craving simplicity
They travelled inward
Past themselves'-

Brilliant, and pure Joni.

Musically 'Shine' is a much sparser affair than anything we have seen from her in the 1980's and 1990's; most of the songs feature Joni herself on piano (and occasionally guitar), with ex-husband Larry Klein on bass and Greg Leisz on pedal steel guitar. The result is that listening to the album is a much more intimate affair than anything she has done since her mid-1970's heyday.

'Shine' is a testimony to Joni Mitchell's unparelleled songwriting ability, and shows that she has certainly not run out of things to say. It sure is good to have her back.

Shine is the long awaited Joni Mitchell LP. In terms of anticipating what was to come from Joni, there is one surprise. The surprise is that on this LP there is no inward looking at self. Instead, Joni turns her attention to the environment, the misuse of science, the politics of selfishness, and domination through war. With only ten tracks on the LP, it was bound to be an ambitious task to address these huge issues satisfactorily.

The stance that Joni is going to take towards the themes of the LP is set out from the beginning with the 4 minutes and 58 seconds instrumental piece, "One Week Last Summer". In a brief explanation of the inspiration behind the piece Joni, in an oblique manner, outlines her stance on the the themes the LP raises. But this is not to suggest that there are hiden aims on this LP. On the contrary, in the main Joni is direct and to the point. She is critical of modern society and this is nowhere more telling than in "Bad Dreams". In this song Joni delivers some harsh words - for example, "The cell phone zombies babble/Through the shopping malls/While condors fall from Indian skies/Whales beach and die in the sand".

The suggestion that the songs on this LP represents Joni's stance about the environment is underpinned by the fact that Joni does a lot on the LP. The music is composed, arranged and produced by her. The lyrics are composed by her except for "If" and she plays many of the instruments. One could not help but wonder if Joni was showing off her considerable talents or keeping down production costs.

Certainly, Joni's talents extend to ambitious daring. The reprise of "Big Yellow Taxi" on this LP is quite apt. It fits in with Joni's evironmental concerns. It was also quite visionary and appropriate to end the LP with the setting of Rudyard Kipling's "If" to music. Here it seems to me that Joni attempts to deliver a message to each of us about the standard of behaviour that is expected.

Nonetheless, Joni's extensive involvement in producing this LP does not detract from the contribution of the small ensemble of muscians who produce a rich mixture of sound. Greg Leisz pedal steel gives a subtle country feel to many of the tracks such as "This Place" and "If I had a Heart". Then there is the melodious sweet sound of Bob Sheppard's soprano saxophone which is very prominient on "Hana". The percussive sounds of Brian Blade, Larry Klein and Paulinho DaCosta connect this LP to some of Joni's past LPs such as the "Hissing of Summer Lawns".

The message of this LP is timely and important but I cannot say that it gripped me. The reason is quite simply that Joni's lyrics are not as powerful as they once were. On some of Joni's previous LPs the lyrics were quite arresting. I would replay tracks asking myself what was that saying.

The lyrics also lack the sophistication of some of Joni's great songs. For example, lines from the title track "Hejira" from the 1976 LP, such as: "Well I looked at granite marker/Those tributes to finality - to eternity/And then I looked at myself here/Chicken scratching for my immortality". On this LP the lyrics are more direct and straight to the point. This is nowhere more in evidence than on the title track "Shine". This I suppose is to be expected given the main concerns of the LP.

The delivery of the songs suggests that the range and reach of Joni's voice is now fixed in the lower register but this is not a criticism rather it is just a mark of passing time.

For me "Shine" does not rank among Joni's great LPs but nonetheless it is a refreshing return by Joni Mitchell to the popular music scene that is lacking great talent. If you are a Joni Mitchell fan, as I am, you will most likely enjoy this LP. However, if you are coming to Joni's music for the first time then you will have to be patient in getting to appreciate it.