Back in the Groove

by Robin Eggar
SAGA
August 2007

It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind - so it's no surprise that Joni Mitchell has made a new album 10 years after 'retiring'. Now 63, she tells Robin Eggar what inspired her sudden burst of creative activity.

Popular musicians don't retire. However many times they call it quits the crowd lures them back for one more encore. However, in 2002 when Joni Mitchell announced her retirement with an attack on the "cesspool" of the record business, most people believed the lady of the canyon really had called it a day and retreated to her studio to pursue her first love: painting.

Yet here she is five years later, a cigarette burning, as energetic and controversial as ever. An extraordinary creative burst has seen her writing Shine, her first album of new songs in 10 years, produce 60 pieces of anti-war art for her first major show in LA, and collaborate with the Alberta Ballet on a new work, The Fiddle and the Drum. Although Shine is still a work in progress, it has all the touches of classic Joni: razor-sharp lyrics, exquisite melodies and that warm, warm voice.

"I really believed I was never going to make another album," she says. "It was like a late birth. I realised that while I've had a very full life, only two-thirds of it is gone. My parents are only 30 years older than I am [her mother Myrtle died aged 95, just after our interview]. "I came straight out of retirement into doing the work of three 20-year-olds. I really burnt myself out physically but emotionally it was very uplifting."

It's amazing what a diet of caffeine and nicotine can do, but then Joni Mitchell has always known who she is, what she wants and how to get it. She looks years younger than her 63 years and dresses with bohemian chic. She is wearing a jaunty green beret decorated by a diamante lizard (she admired it at singer Graham Nash's 60th birthday party and Nash pestered the owner into giving it to her). Her Gap jeans are worn over work-boots but her layered tops are from Issey Miyake. Her rings are gold, understated but tasteful.

Comfortably off, she doesn't flaunt it or make diva demands. In the hotel room where we meet she had listened to her album on the bedside CD player until the Alberta Ballet's artistic director lent her his stereo. She is polite, with wisps of prairie in her accent. She laughs easily and when she listens to music she's lost in the moment. She needs to smoke and she smokes a lot.

Her primary, Los Angeles, home is a "hacienda" in the exclusive Bel Air district, with a tiled Spanish roof, pink walls and rooms furnished with antiques, all surrounded by citrus trees. "I have a bit of the decorator in me," she says. In LA she lives alone with her Jack Russell, Coco, and two cats (there were nine). She giggles when she tells me that the neutered cats have taken to mimicking sex acts to mock her self-imposed celibacy. Like them, she is nocturnal, and paints, records or simply chats all night. She has her breakfast - soup, toast, eggs, coffee and cigarettes - sitting outside the Daily Grill in Brentwood at about 3pm.

Her rambling discourses - she hates distilling ideas into soundbites - follow patterns of their own. It is the way she creates her songs and paintings, perhaps even lives her life. Imagine an empty sky slowly filling with clouds of ideas, some intriguing, way off in the distance, others denser, storm-bringers.

Raised in windswept Saskatoon, Roberta Joan Anderson survived childhood polio (which also crippled fellow Canadian musician Neil Young), to become a California icon in the early Seventies. Her confessional lyrics and pure voice struck a chord with the Woodstock generation - though ironically she wasn't allowed to attend the festival by her manager and penned her hit song Woodstock after watching it on television.

While her record sales have steadily decreased since the heady million-selling days of albums like Court And Spark, and Blue, her music is still unique. She moved from chronicler of lost love to pouring acid on fundamentalist Christians, "Reaganomics", and people who do nothing while the world decays. Once described as being "as modest as Mussolini", Mitchell knows she's good, indeed better, than most of her male contemporaries, including such high-profile boyfriends as David Crosby, Nash, James Taylor and Jackson Browne.

She is acutely sensitive to criticism and is annoyed when some ingenue is hailed as the "new Joni Mitchell". She finds it hard to understand why some prefer the simplicity of her early albums. "I was girly, 'twee', as the English say," she says. "I got more tooth later. You are supposed to stay neatly in your decade and then die; the rejection of my later work was too extreme." By the mid-Nineties she was worn down by lack of respect but obdurate. In 1998 she toured with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. While they played their hits, Mitchell sang new songs. "I never wanted to be a human jukebox."

In 2002, when she recorded a retrospective, Travelogue, her three-octave voice was shot. "I'd go to hit a note and there was nothing there," she says. "People blamed it on my smoking but I've smoked since I was nine, so it obviously didn't affect my early work that much." In fact she had developed nodes from singing, her larynx was compressed and she had other physical problems caused by polio. Rest, a Chinese healer and an osteopath have restored most of her power and range.

There was another reason for her quitting the business. In 1997 she became simultaneously a mother and a grandmother. Although the clues were stamped all over her songs, few people knew that in 1965, as a penniless art student, she'd given away her baby girl for adoption. The father, Brad MacMath, who was her first boyfriend, had left for California and she didn't tell her parents for two years: the public for 30 more.

Joni married twice, to American folk musician Chuck Mitchell and bass player and producer Larry Klein, a union which ended amicably in 1992, but she had no other children. "It left a hole in me," she said of the adoption, "that I didn't fill until the day I saw her again." Her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, now 42, a onetime model and photographer, had a young son Marlon. A daughter, Daisy, was born in June 1999.

Mitchell became granny to Marlon, now 14, and seven-year-old Daisy, reading children's books and watching Disney films. "I spent a few years pottering," she says. "I didn't think I'd ever write again. In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss."

Except that fairytales don't always end happily and Joni learnt that you cannot rebuild a lifetime apart in a few years. Kilauren is as strong-willed as her mother. Their relationship has been fraught and is not something Joni wants to discuss. "Let's just say it's a work in progress," she says.

In 2005, the war in Iraq, coupled with estrangement from Kilauren, galvanised her into action. She headed back to her haven in British Columbia, where three more moving songs followed. When a friend read her Rudyard Kipling's poem If, she knew she had the album's optimistic closing number. A joyful upbeat Latino remake of her classic hit Big Yellow Taxi sums up her optimism and the ecological themes of Shine.

"When they decided to whittle down this mountain behind my sanctuary and sell it as gravel I had another song," she says. "Global warming really shows on my property in BC. We get hurricane winds which blew a lot of my trees over. We've had a drought for 15 years. First the juniper went brown and died and now there aren't many of my pines left. "I'm proud of the new album because this is as serious a work as I've ever done. I have always had an ecological overview. In the Arctic, polar bears are cannibalising each other because they have nothing to eat. All of the toxicity rides on the warm winds to the Poles, where it dumps. People there who have never polluted anything are getting the worst fallout. Is anyone paying attention?" It is when the moon rises that she truly sparkles. As the stories and reminiscences unfold, the glass of red wine and the overflowing ashtray fade into other places and times, brought alive by her painter's eye for detail and setting. How she first heard Edith Piaf in a French-Canadian household with crinkled pink tablecloths; how at times she feels she is really a nine-year-old boy. Growing up in Saskatoon the girls were bitchy. As a consequence, she says she is most comfortable with creative, gay or black men. She laughs, "The second-in-command of the LA gang the Cribs is a 300lb black man and he is a fan. I have a big black audience."

For fun she plays pool and dances - it's surprising how long it's taken her to become involved with ballet. After she recovered from polio, sports were off-limits, so she took up smoking and dancing. "There were two notorious dance clubs which were forbidden to me but I went to them from the age of 13," she says. "You couldn't buy alcohol after 8pm so you had to go to the bootleggers... that was colourful."

Mitchell's next task is finishing - or rather beginning - her autobiography. The publishers paid her some years back. "They're getting a bit chompy," she grins. "Recently I had the idea of Cats, Characters and Dreams... disjointed vignettes. I tried to tell stories but I didn't find myself scintillating. I am a really good listener, I soak up all the dialogue. I don't indulge that much in wishing. I've always kept the carrot pretty close to the nose, just inched my way forward.

"I remember too much, that's the problem. I wasn't a druggie for long enough for natural editing to take place." We look forward to the next chapter. Shine will be released in the autumn.