To go on to the next period you have to be able to withstand a tremendous amount of rejection,” asserts Joni Mitchell from behind a curtain of cigarette smoke. “Everything I loved was completely snickered at, razzed and ridiculed at the time of its release.” Her voice rises and falls in singsong cadences and subtle changes of inflection, as she leaps forward like a proud mama lion in defence of her brood. “You see,” she says with escalating animation, “I’ve done 17 albums since 1968, and each one of them is like a dear child. I’m protective of my babies. I’m ready to defend them, and so I should be. There’s beauty there waiting for you,” she adds earnestly. “So if I’m defensive you have to understand that these are my children that have had their noses bloodied.”

Joni Mitchell is one of those artists about whom there is very little middle ground. For my tastes, she has few peers as a singer/songwriter, save for Dylan and Neil Young, and she’s really stretched out in the studio, creating innovative audiophile recordings and progressive electronic hoodoo every bit as hip as anything Peter Gabriel, Weather Report, Kate Bush or Brian Eno have done. But musicianship doesn’t have that much cachet in our whathaveyoudoneformelately alternative nation. Every artist has their admirers and detractors. To my astonishment (because most artists never cop to read their clippings), Joni seems to have heard every positive and negative word ever uttered in regards to her singular milieu, and seems to take it personally, very personally.

“I can remember the essence of the rejections for nearly every project,” she affirms. “They were out of synch with their time, frequently off by about two years. I’ve been kicked out of every school of music there is, basically. A classical musician includes some of my music in his concert in London and they haul him up on the carpet to explain why. The Grand Ole Opry thought I was a country singer because I was on the Johnny Cash show, and when I took the LA Express in – a jazz band – they never had me back there. And then they excommunicated me from the airwaves for doing the Mingus project. Well, you know, that led to the decline of my popularity. Suddenly the press began to say her work is jazzy. And people would go, ‘Jazzy the dreaded jazzy, we hate jazzy, we don’t like it, we can’t understand it!’ I was pretty much eradicated from the music scene at a certain point. It’s like nobody wanted me to exist, you know’” she declares matter-of-factly, concluding with mischievous triumph that “it was a good period for exploration, because no matter what I did they were going to hate it. So it provided a kind of freedom.”

I’m sitting across from her at a table in the Polo Lounge on Manhattan’s East Side. The beauty of her craft, the freedom of her vision and the striking originality of her songs and orchestrations have been an enormous source of inspiration for me, going back to the ‘60s. Like Miles Davis, she is a lyric artist with an exquisite, personal style that is easily identifiable yet impossible to copy. Their music seems to emanate from secret places far removed from the safe havens of conformity. Both were driven by a compulsion to keep growing, and had the guts to turn their backs on those whose affection for a particular peak period was so profound they’d have frozen them in amber if they had half a chance. Like Miles, Joni never really played to her fans, speaking directly only to her muse, with nary a backwards glance except to invite audiences along for the next bumpy ride. And from the grace of her folk period through the outreach and charm of her pop break, through Court and Spark to the painterly collages, jazz harmonies and profuse orchestrations of her mature works following Mingus, Joni Mitchell has endured in this fan’s heart, because she dares to take chances, to push the envelope of her art at every stage, to acknowledge and nurture her childlike aspects – to strive for originality, no matter how dear the price (as measured in hits).

Yet when it comes to making music, she’s fearless, “I think it’s very important to teach people to take the risk, and view failure as one step towards success,” she declares. “You should not be afraid to fail, especially if you want something fresh. Say you have five solutions to a problem, and all of them are commonplace. Well, throw it into randomness. Often, out of the chaos, come these great juxtapositions. I do it with film, I do it by twiddling the strings into a different tuning—I throw it open to the cosmos. then when you discover something that has an element of divine intervention, it’s like a blessing—and it’s real exciting. And it also restores your faith in the greater other,” she laughs. “It draws you into a state where synchronicity can come in.”

Here’s the woman who defined a liberated feminine (not feminist) persona years before Liz Phair, Tori Amos or Madonna got their first hickeys, who dealt openly and honestly with her own sexuality, and had the grace to acknowledge romance in a more mature vein with Wild Things Run Fast (which marked the occasion of her romance with, and marriage to, bassist Larry Klein, launching a fruitful series of musical collaborations). Looking into her eyes, I have a vision of Joni as a feisty 90year-old, holding court in her rocking chair like some eminence grise, railing against conformity and spiritual indifference, nothing but damn copycats, afraid of you if you’ve got anything new to say, as she looks around furtively for the nurse and leans forward toward her guest, asking in a stage whisper: “Young man, are you sure you don’t have any cigarettes?”

Now comes her seventeenth album, Turbulent Indigo, which is magnificent—as vital as anything she’s done. The record is an edgy, unsettling work. Mitchell confronts the darkening clouds on America’s horizon, decrying the abuse and dehumanization of women, the herd mentality that drives art, the artificial barriers we erect that keep us apart, the pain and bitterness we endure as the toll charge for sensitivity. Painting her canvas in broad, vivid strokes of instrumental color, the orchestrations on Turbulent Indigo are all the more lovely for the shadowy tales of fear, anger, regret and isolation these songs depict. In the end, the wayward pilgrims who populate Turbulent Indigo vent their rage and wrestle with their doubts, but come out on the side of the angels—and like Job, endure with grace and move on.

“Well, you know,” she cautions, her voice dropping down for emphasis, “there’s always a danger or reading too much into these songs. I mean, I’m not saying I’m Job. There was this one writer who was just convinced that ‘Sire of Sorrows’ was autobiographical, and I had to explain to him that the text was right out of the Bible, I’ve always tried to make the meanings of my songs broad enough that listeners could find themselves there. But I am cleaning out a lot. This album represents a lot of soul cleansing for me, getting out the crap, you know? I mean already the new songs on the next album are of a different nature. I can’t afford to be carrying extra baggage in my spirit. I have to fight this thing with cheer.”

At first listen, Turbulent Indigo is an aural banquet for the senses. Half-speed mastered LPs of Court and Spark were popular demo records at high-end audio emporiums a generation ago, and this CD should achieve similar audiophile status. The stereo field is unbelievably broad and deep; all the instruments are rendered with wonderful detail and resonance; Wayne Shorter’s soprano saxophone is serpentine and mellifluous, and Joni’s voice bobs along like a harvest moon on a slightly hazy night. Her offhanded observation about how sex drives everything…and, oh, by the way, “Sex Kills,” is accompanied by a swirling, diabolical whirlpool of sounds that would make Robert Fripp feel right at home. A breezy, almost countryish wash of textures, and Seal’s engaging background vocals, wrap her lovely reading of Dan Hartman’s “How Do You Stop” (a possible airplay anthem) in a cool, elegant R&B aura. And the title tune, with its poignant conversations between shorter and Mitchell, essays its tale of stifled creativity in general (and Van Gogh in particular) in an almost flamencan rhythm style.

“You can hear it that way,” Joni allows, “that’s the interesting thing about it, you can hear it that way, but it’s swinging too. That’s my attempt at playing a black Southern shuffle. But my thumb has a very vertical pattern to it, which is similar to a Balinese monkey chant. So it’s very Senegalese in its effect—it’s swinging and it’s vertical at the same time. So it’s almost as if you were watching an airplane propeller; it’s swinging to the right and all of a sudden it holds still and it swings to the left? It’s an audio illusion.”

Conceptually Turbulent Indigo seems to be a reaffirmation of Joni Mitchell’s roots and fruits, in which the best elements of each stylistic phase are integrated within the orchestral canvas she’s been evolving with greater success since Wild Things Run Fast. There’s a renewed focus on the relationship between her spatial acoustic guitar tunings and that voice, which has mellowed and deepened into a rich, mature instrument, more mezzo than soprano, melodically confident and assured, as if carrying on an extended conversation with herself.

“Well, maybe this is my Amarcord in a certain area, you know what I mean?” There come periods of synopsis. I don’t have the hindsight to see that yet. I played it against the last album and I thought Night Ride Home was a lot sparser than I remembered. At first, I thought Turbulent Indigo was a greater departure. But I still have a lot of orchestration in my system. And I would have orchestrated this one more, except it wouldn’t hold it. We added things, took them off and added things, and took them off and it came to rest as it is. Part of the reason for that is some of the guitar tunings I came up with. The low bass string on my guitar is frequently much lower; it’s down to B on ‘The Magdalene Laundries,’ which is really into the upper mid of the bass’s range. So, if the bass moved around too much, it was eating the bassline on the guitar. Also, Klein had taken some of my sounds—for instance, the sounds of drums that I selected for projects—and they began to go out onto the projects of another woman, so … we had to go off in a fresh direction—things we’d done in the past had to be reinvented. And one of the things I did was to curtail movement on the bottom end of the bass. We had to go in a new direction, because not only had I done it already, but others were doing it. It was too common. I had to lay some restrictions down and it was difficult at first, trying to find a way. But we ended up with very simple pads and the lack of movement gave this clarity of movement of the bass and the guitar. As for my voice, sure, it’s deepened over time, but I never was, I don’t think, a natural soprano. I was singing in falsetto because it was the style of the time and the type of music that I entered into, but I’m naturally more of a midrange voice.”

The waiter finally comes with our food, and some casual fans will be unnerved to discover that Joni did not order a bowl of oats, a side of sprouts and a tofu daiquiri. She had a steak, friends, and tore into it like the carnivorous earth goddess she is, praise the lord.

“I first realized I was a musician when I was about seven or eight. I used to dream I could play the piano beautifully. We went to see this Kirk Douglas movie called The Story of Three Loves. It was three short films and the theme music was ‘Variations on a Theme by Paganini.’ To this day I think it’s the most beautiful melody I ever heard, and I used to go down to a store in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where you could go into a booth and take the record out of the sleeve and listen to it before you purchased it, and I’m just swooning over this beautiful music. So I wanted to learn how to play it.

“But I could learn it faster by ear than I could by reading it, and so my teacher would rap my knuckles. And that took some of the joy out of it. I wanted to compose, and as a matter of fact I found something I had written for piano at that time, called ‘Robin Walk.’ But my teacher discouraged that. She said, ‘Why would you want to compose when you could have the masters under your fingers?’ So, the lesson was on a Saturday morning and I think it conflicted with Wild Bill Hickok or something, and I lost interest. I was viewed by my parents then as a quitter, so later in my teens when I wanted a guitar my mother refused to buy me one and said, ‘You won’t stick with it, it will be just like the piano.’ So, I bought my own instrument. I bought a baritone ukulele.

“My father was in the North Battleford Kinsmen’s Band, it was a marching band in the town. My father was briefly the leader of the band, and I wanted to play drums, terribly. They said girls don’t play drums, so that was denied. My father played trumpet. He would have liked to have been Harry James but, as he put it, he couldn’t interpolate. And he used to play duets with my piano teacher who rapped my knuckles.

“Then I was stricken with polio and my legs were taken from me, temporarily. I kind of made a promise to my Christmas tree, that if I could get up and walk that I would pay it back somehow. So when I got out of the hospital I joined the church choir. And I asked particularly for the descant part. I called it the pretty melody. The descant was a melody that threaded everything together. And it had wide intervals, that some people couldn’t learn because they were too weird.

“I don’t think I lasted too long in the choir, but I did learn to smoke there. One night after choir practice – in the winter – one of the girls had a package of cigarettes that she’d taken from her mother, who was a chain smoker, and left a pack in every room. And we sat by the fishpond, which was empty for the winter and full of snow, and we’d pass these cigarettes around. Most of the girls coughed and winced and choked, but I took to it like a duck. And after that I sold pop bottles and newspapers and made enough petty cash to afford a pack-a-week habit. It seemed to ground me. My ninth year was a real emotional ordeal. I had three killer diseases in a row, and a sense of estrangement from the world. It was just a private celebration; it was between me and nobody. And in a way I’d been through so much travail by the age of nine, that I felt like I’d earned my adult right to smoke.

“At the age of 11, we were listening to Louis Jordan: ‘Saturday Night Fish Fry’ and ‘The House of Blue Lights.’ My next love came when rock’n’roll was born. And from let’s say seventh grade until my second year of grade 12, I was a rock’n’roll dancer. At that point I was looking for dance halls. And there were school dances all over the place, and the emergence of some public dance halls. That became kind of my reason to be. And specially the jukebox at the Avenue 11 swimming pool and the jukebox at the CM Lunch, which was on the west side of town, where I was forbidden to go. 20th Street then had the highest crime rate per capita in Canada. It was called Little Chicago.

“Then there was this group of guys: They were my dance partners – we used to call them Ocean’s 11. Three or four of them went to New York City and came back with scruffy little goatees, and berets and striped T-shirts and one of them wanted a mural of beatniks on his bedroom wall. And I’d always painted. I was always kind of the school artist. That was how kids identified me, and it was my identity. So, I do believe he paid me with a jazz record. Anyway, somehow or other, into my record collection crept Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s The Hottest New Sound in Jazz, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and my first rap record, Oscar Brown Junior’s Signifying Monkey, and that really began to interest me in private, because there was no scene for it around me.

“Then in grade 12 I picked up the baritone ukulele and began to introvert: sit in the corner and pick on this thing. I was still in high school but a lot of my friends were in college, and the new style of partying was emerging where people sat around and sang folk songs. I enjoyed that. We used to go out in the bush and drink beer and put our cars in a circle and turn all the radios on at once and dance wildly in the stubble. I liked that too, but I also liked this more pensive kind of partying. I wasn’t serious at all, it was just for the fun of it. It wasn’t for a while that I began to write songs. I had always written poetry, but I didn’t see the correlation between poetry and songwriting, until Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street.’ It’s the first time I ever heard anger expressed in a song. And I thought, gee, you can write about anything. So that was a catalyst to think about a lot of things.”

And the rest, as the scribes say, is history. Young Roberta Joan Anderson was swept up in the wake of turbulent indigo, and became Joni Mitchell. Between sips of coffee, two aging children go back and forth across the years, rehashing the triumphs and tribulations, and always that little glint of frustration rises to the surface. Joni Mitchell has driven herself to move forward, ever forward, while keeping the divine child of her inspirations alive, but at what price? And where’s the applause? Even earth goddesses get the blues.

“ I came to the crossroads,” she sighs, “and I had to decide in this last year if I really wanted to get out of the business. I’d just had it with it. I thought I can’t afford to be in the business any longer, basically — it’s time to cash out and get out, you know. I’m being told repeatedly that everything I do is no good. With exceptions. There have been a few champions here and there, but they were really swimming against the tide,” she smiles gently. “So I just thought, what’s the point? I mean it’s time to get off; it’s time to develop my painting, it’s time to write some books — there’s a lot of things I’d like to do. If I cash out now and get out of town, I could live modestly and well. The thing that stopped me, really, was that I felt that this album was important…but if I gave it to Geffen no one would hear it. And either I would give it to him and call it Swan Song and get out, or I would give it to Mo [Ostin, of Warner Bros.] and straighten out some of my back business with him, and then I would have to go another… whatever, you know, ten or 12 years with bean counters at the top; with a conglomerate over my head of unknown people who care nothing about music, but only digits pushed; with a myriad of out clauses where there are many, many ways to dump me.” Joni smiles and flips back her hair in a gesture of defiance. Her sensitive child recedes for the moment, and her diva reemerges, proud and sassy — a bad girl ready to stir up some trouble. “But that’s my ace in the hole,” she whispers conspiratorially. “I don’t give a damn, you know. Dump me, see if I care!” Her voice drops an octave, and takes on an ancient mojo tone. “I was born in the briar patch,” she laughs.

We part warmly, but a week later I am treated to a long-distance grilling by an ornery Joni Mitchell, the likes of which I haven’t experienced since my collegiate oral exams. How did this misunderstanding come about? Maybe I’d done something to hurt her feelings? Or, perhaps, as Lester Young once characterized it: “You’re with someone, and you think they’re cussing you out, but they’re actually calling themselves a motherfucker, and you just happen to be in the same room.”

My rapt enthusiasm for Turbulent Indigo seemed to Joni to indicate a relative lack of esteem for the rest of her post-Mingus canon. She felt like I was sitting in judgment of her. Anyway, after we talked out our misunderstandings, Joni told me that “I’m basically a very, very open person, and that’s the way I communicate with everyone. But when talking with the press, I often find myself going back over things I said, and feel like I’ve left myself very vulnerable. I need to be reassured.”

Why are you so sensitive?

“Why am I so sensitive?”

Yeah. What do you care what people think? So long as they keep talking about you. Ultimately, you can’t please anybody. You can only please yourself.

“Exactly.”

Right, so tell all these motherfuckers to go fuck themselves—-and tell me to fuck off, too, while you’re at it. You’re Joni Mitchell.

“Well, look, I’m not whining and I’m not complaining. Sensitivity, I find, is a very important perspective.”

The most important perspective. How else can you open yourself up to creativity?

“You need all four major perspectives. You need I know, you need I see, you need I feel, and you need I sense.” She pauses. “I’m very childlike in a certain way. Like, you like me, I like you. You don’t, I don’t. You know what I mean?” she laughs.

And what’s the nicest thing someone ever said to you, Joni?

She brightens right up. “You know, in my entire adult life, my favorite compliment — and I think a true compliment should be inspiring, not just flattering — was received from a blind black piano player. And what he said was ‘Joni, thank you for your music — it is genderless and raceless.’”

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OUT CHORUS

“Lately for guitars Joni’s been using a fairly recent Martin D-45,” explains long-time accomplice Joel Bernstein, “and a pair of Martin-style guitars by a luthier named Collings, I believe, which are based on D-28 and 00-45 styles.” Joel helped her develop a system wherein she could come up with a performance set based on her roughly 40 tunings, a play them on six guitars, which Joel would adjust between songs.

“Each of these tunings is like Alice going through the looking glass – you enter another world, quite different than in standard tuning. And in many of these tunings, the chords Joni came up with, and the fingerings, were completely idiomatic, and she began writing in them. And pop people; because of the combination of her chords and melodies, her tunes began to sound more jazz-like, particularly on Hejira, and especially on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. She has been an innovator in this area, and very few people have delved into it at all, and for me, the one other person I’ve heard do something creative with this approach is Michael Hedges.

“As the years went by, and her voice deepened, so did the tunings, and a lot of them that used to derive from a D, are now open C-based, and beyond. Now, Joni uses a normal medium-gauge set on her guitars, but I’d probably use an .058 instead of an .056, maybe even going up to an .060, if you wanted to really ring true C. On ‘The Magdalene Laundries’ from the new album, the tuning is B-F#-B-E-A-E. When you tune the low string that slack, it gets pretty floppy down there, like a dumbek, and there’s a tendency for the string to go sharp and go flat.”

“In my own particular way, I invented the chorus,” Joni adds. “This is Fred Walikee’s tale of the invention of the chorus machine. On Hejira I doubled the guitar and I doubled it in a way that Wayne Shorter and Miles double up on Nefertiti. It’s like silkscreening – it’s not tight doubling. I’m playing the part twice but there’s some variations on it so they’re not perfectly tight – they’re shadowing each other in some places. That sound was satisfactory for me for that project, so when it cam time I asked Fred, ‘Do you have anything that will break the signal on a guitar and double it? I need to somehow or other duplicate this sound in performance,’ he said, ‘Gee, I don’t – there’s nothing like that.’ “So, the Japanese were very earnest at that time and interested in how their products were doing and were checking in with them from time to time. Some salesman from Roland came to see me, and I asked them, do you have anything for spreading the signal and doubling the guitar part? ‘Oh, no.’ So they went away and in a very short space of time they came back to Fred with the original Roland Jazz Chorus amp.”