Joni Mitchell 23: Shine

If you leave a genius alone long enough, she’ll emerge when she has something to say. And that’s exactly what Joni Mitchell did, nearly a decade after her last album of new material. Shine arrived with no agenda, save the pile of songs she’d just created, or came to her, however you want to put it. Best of all, most were simply arranged, with nothing reeking of any time period or musical trend—just her voice, her piano or guitar, and a few friends adding the instruments she didn’t play, like winds and pedal steel.

In an unexpected move, Shine begins with “One Week Last Summer”, a wonderful piano instrumental with saxophone that manages to sound fully orchestrated. “This Place” celebrates the great outdoors and wide open spaces, helped by pedal steel guitar, in the hope that there’ll still be time before they all get mined for any number of reasons. She returns to the piano for “If I Had A Heart”, a lament for the state of the world in the post-9/11 world and the numbness that has resulted. The drum machine and effects turn up on “Hana”, and she adds some amazingly distorted guitar herself, which is jarring at first. However, taken as part of the whole it’s not too distracting, particularly with the slow pretty piano of “Bad Dreams”.

A remake of “Big Yellow Taxi” is unnecessary, except to enforce that she’d been pissed about the environment for decades. The canned beats continue, along with that wacky guitar, on “Night Of The Iguana”, which was inspired by the movie of the play of the same name, tied to the ecological theme. “Strong And Wrong” is back to the piano, mourning centuries of man’s hubris in the name of religion. For an excellent juxtaposition, the title track is a lengthy prayer, asking for grace for all things on Earth, from little children and starving fishermen to misguided leaders and even those who inspire road rage. That would be a heavy way to go out, but instead she chooses to end with “If”, an adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling poem that extols strength in the face of chaos.

A comeback of this magnitude would normally lead directly to a Grammy for Album of the Year; instead, that increasingly dubious honor went to Herbie Hancock’s all-star tribute River: The Joni Letters, out the same day. Featuring appearances by Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, and the woman herself, it recast songs from her catalog into Starbucks-friendly jazz, pushed along by Wayne Shorter and Vinnie Colaiuta. The album works best on the instrumental tracks, particularly as two of them are jazz standards: “Solitude”, by Duke Ellington, and “Nefertiti”, which Shorter (who wrote it) and Hancock played with Miles Davis. (A 10-year anniversary edition thoughtfully included a second disc comprising the four bonus tracks that had been farmed out to Amazon and iTunes.)

Joni Mitchell Shine (2007)—3½
Herbie Hancock River: The Joni Letters (2007)—3
2017 Expanded Edition: same as 2007, plus 4 extra tracks