Joni Mitchell has battled polio and poverty, survived sexism and ageism, and influenced everyone from Prince to Veruca Salt. With her seventeenth album, she reemerges from the shadows with her social, political, and musical convictions intact.

A couple of years back, at Elizabeth Taylor's sixtieth birthday party, Joni Mitchell ran into her friend, former roommate, and longtime record executive David Geffen. Apparently, the moody mogul was feeling unusually sorry for himself that particular afternoon, because, after scrutinizing Mitchell's face in the midday sun, he said, "We're old." And then he turned and skulked away.

In our culture in general and in the recording industry in particular, the word OLD is a damning indictment - especially for women, who are tacitly expected to leave the stage quietly the moment they cease figuring prominently in the masturbatory fantasies of adolescent boys. Or at least that's the impression you get watching MTV and VH-1, where it's surely no coincidence that two-sizes-too-small underwear and dishevelled beds play such critical roles in the music videos of Madonna, Courtney Love, and Janet Jackson.

Although there are signs that the wall of ageism is beginning to crumble - welcome back the craggy, world-weary faces of Mick Jagger (51), Keith Richards (51), Eric Clapton (50), Robert Plant (46), Don Henley (47), and, yes, Tom Jones (54) - with the exception of Tina Turner, who is so often heralded as the eighth wonder of the world that it's almost creepy, it seems only males are granted special dispensation to pass through.

Not surprisingly, considering that she came of age in the counter-culture of the sixties, Mitchell takes the long view on time: "A swami told me that in my last life I was a bird, that in the life before that I was an English gentleman, and before that an Arab rug merchant." Nonetheless, Mitchell, who looks forward to coming back as a monastic in her next life, resents the stigma attached to being 51 in this one. "It's a form of bigotry the way middle age is dealt with in our society." she says. "We don't see a lot of pictures of beautiful middle-aged women. We see a few, but they're maintained - nipped and tucked. I haven't done it myself, and I'd rather not, because I've seen some face-lifts, and even on the great beauties they create only a distant illusion of youthfulness. Still, I wouldn't rule it out, because my business is very youth-oriented. But there have to be exceptions....Simone Signoret went a very brave route, and she was a sexpot. But she liked her food and she liked her coffee, and she did some great character roles with middle-aged spread and satchels under her eyes, and I think she was beautiful in them."

If such a wide-angle perspective means that Mitchell is less vulnerable to vanity than most, it does not mean that aging is without its dark side for her. "I had polio at the age of nine. My spine was twisted up like a train wreck. I couldn't walk. I was paralyzed. Forty years later it comes back with a vengeance. It's like multiple sclerosis. It means your electrical system burns out and your muscles begin to atrophy. It means impending paraplegia."

Mitchell delivers her cataclysmic news with the dispassionate matter-of-factness of a "slightly scattered showers" weather report. She's seated in her kitchen, in a straight-backed wooden chair pulled up to a rough-hewn table on which she has placed a guitar, a mug of instant coffee, and two packs of cigarettes that she makes her way through with Bette Davis speed. She's wearing a green cowl-neck sweater and green jeans, and though she's warmer than cordial, she's a bit distant, a bit beyond reach - like a painting behind glass.

"I'm slowing down; I have to guard my energy," she continues. "My wiring has been animating four muscles when it should have been animating one or two. Just like the bunnies in those battery commercials, I'm the one that's about to keel over. I'm not the one that's going and going.

"Basically, what the AMA says is 'Lie down and die.' But over there in mystery land where I've chosen my medical aid, there's hope. I'm in the hands of two kinds of occult types who give me energy transfusions by pointing their fingers at me. I've got this Chinese guy who's trying to address my DNA and tell it that nothing ever happened. Well, maybe he can do it. I give him faith, because faith is luminous." And then, as if to stave any potential flow of sympathy, Mitchell adds, "The polio survivor is a stubborn creature. I'm in good spirits, and high spirits is how I beat it before."

One source of Mitchell's good spirits is TURBULENT INDIGO (Reprise), her seventeenth album, which is enjoying the kind of critical praise that greeted not only her debut album, JONI MITCHELL, in 1968, but also the rapid succession of albums that followed: CLOUDS, LADIES OF THE CANYON, BLUE, FOR THE ROSES, and COURT AND SPARK. True to her classic form, troubling times lace through the ten new songs, which explore an unsettling spectrum of contemporary themes - from wife abuse, child molestation, and rape to lost love, the "ulcerated ozone," and aging. Perhaps to prove that time has not weakened her moral resolve, Mitchell turned up in early February on THE TONIGHT SHOW, where she chose to sing the searing song she wrote in the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. riots, "Sex Kills" - for which she received thunderous applause.

It's been a long time coming for Mitchell, who began to slip from commercial and critical grace in the mid-seventies when she began to shift out of the introspective, lone-voice-in-the-wilderness gear that garnered her six gold and two platinum albums and with them cult status on a par with Bob Dylan, one of the two people Mitchell considers her equal: "Dylan and Leonard Cohen are my real peers. We're the poets of that generation."

Despite her undaunted self-confidence, the eighties were not Mitchell's time. "I lost some people when I went from singing I to singing YOU," she explains. "I lost some people when I added a band. I lost some people when I cut the band a little slack. I even lost some people for a photograph of myself in a swimming pool that somehow made me look uppity. Another thing was that in the eighties we moved into a particularly unromantic period in music. Videos had just begun, and they had a tendency to feature cold women with dark lipstick and stilettos grinding men's hands into the ground. It was an antilove period, and my work - WILD THINGS RUN FAST, in particular - was a joyous celebration of love, which basically made people sick." Then as now, Mitchell played the hand she was dealt: "Once I realized that I had fallen from favor, I decided to stretch out." Experiments with jazz, synthesizers, and ethnic music, as well as collaborations with Tom Scott and Charles Mingus, followed.

Considering Mitchell's iconic standing as a sort of angst-ridden angel who carries the weight of the world on her socially conscious shoulders, it is unsurprising that her attempts to stretch her wings were regarded as a personal betrayal by the generation her music helped define. "People like me to suffer, to bleed for them," she offers. "That's how I entered the arena, and that's how people want me to remain. But I can't pander to public opinion. Besides, the fact is no matter how talented you are, you fall out of favor. It used to happen after about five years. Now, I think, it's more like three."

If TURBULENT INDIGO represents a return to favor, it also represents a return to Reprise, the Warner Bros. label on which Mitchell recorded her first four albums. Last year, after a 20-year period during which she recorded for Asylum and David Geffen's company, Mitchell allowed Mo Ostin, the much-loved chairman of Warner Bros. Records, to persuade her to jump ship and sign a five-record contract. About leaving Geffen, Mitchell remains discreet: "I'll just make David mad if I tell you the truth, and I don't know how to tell you anything but the truth. So, let's just say it was time."

The homecoming is not without its risks. On January 2, after 37 years, Ostin retired, which leaves Mitchell without a friend at the top. And in her opinion, she needs one. "I don't sell a lot of records. Geffen carried me because he knows I'm gifted. He said, 'Joan, you can record with me till you're 70.' I hope Warner Bros. will extend the same courtesy to me. Mo used to be the man, but now you have a corporate mystery man, and he's inherited me, and I'm not going to recoup. So, there's the possibility that I'll be dropped. Although I do feel some responsibility to my gift, my ace in the hole is that I don't care if they drop me. I'll just cash in my marbles and go paint." Nonetheless, Mitchell hastily adds a proviso: "Even if I get dropped, that doesn't necessarily mean the end. Bonnie Raitt was dropped, and she came back with a vengeance."

Although it is unlikely that Mitchell will abandon music, the threat to go paint is hardly idle. "As Henry Miller said, 'Paint and die happy,'" she says, noting that she considers herself a painter first and foremost. "I have a painter's mentality, much more than a musician's." In tune with her self-image, Mitchell riddles her speech with the language of visual art. Explaining why she made thirteen albums without a producer, for example, she says, "A producer takes your brush and puts his strokes on."

If, for years, Mitchell explored abstraction in her painting, at present her work is unapologetically traditional - landscapes, still lifes, portraits. "Partly because I wanted to get my chops up to do that spoof on Van Gogh for the cover of TURBULENT INDIGO," she explains, referring to the self-portrait she modeled after Van Gogh's famous 1889 self-portrait. Although Mitchell's "black comedy" is faithful to the original, right down to the bandaged ear, she concedes the ironic allusion may be lost on many: "It's true, a lot of people don't know what a Van Gogh painting looks like, so they're not going to get a big guffaw out of it. I wanted to help them by having little tin ears fall out of the album, but it was too expensive."

Mitchell's self-portrait currently hangs in the breakfast room of the sprawling, Spanish-style house she bought 20 years ago in Bal Air for $350,000. "It should have been a million," she estimates, "but Spanish-style houses were out of vogue in L.A. at the time. People wanted stainless steel and clean lines. Patina was most definitely not happening in '76 - high-tech was. Besides, Bel Air wasn't a neighborhood in favor then. Reagan hadn't moved back in yet."

Mitchell shares the house with a trio of cats, one of whom is named after the German philosopher she stumbled across during a particularly dark time in her life, Nietzsche. "You have to have spent prolonged prone periods with death barking at you to understand Nietzsche," she says. "It's the clarity of someone with nothing left to lose. When I discovered THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, it was uncanny and pertinent - it was my salvation." Without prompting, Mitchell recites a couple of lines: "The poet is the vainest of the vain...he muddies his waters that he may appear deep." And then she laughs, a resonant, throaty laugh in which you can hear every cigarette the chain-smoker has ever smoked.

Although Mitchell claims that she is not susceptible to loneliness at home in her big walled-in house, fear is something she is familiar with. "I've had a lot of stalkers in my career. I've had to live under armed guard. One guy saw me as the gateway to God, the voice of his dead sister, his wife-to-be. He also had really violent necrophiliac fantasies, which he described in detail in writing. He lived in the bushes - literally, like Robinson Crusoe - out here for two years. Months would go by, and nothing would happen. The guards thought I was a neurotic, but they'd leave for fifteen minutes, and he'd come over the wall, climb up on the roof, and start screaming and shaking the windows." As a consequence of her years "under siege," Mitchell goes to bed at sunrise and begins her day between noon and 2:00.

By any standard, Mitchell's days in L.A. are good ones - at least in material terms. There's a Mercedes roadster in the gated drive. There's a cobalt blue mosaic pool overlooking a ravine. There are gardeners and pool cleaners and housekeepers. And, her modified hippie image notwithstanding, there are closets full of predominantly Japanese clothes, of which Mitchell is something of a connoisseur. "I buy them for some occasion that never happens," she confesses. "I like some of Yohji Yamamoto's things, and I like the Victorian influence on Matsuda's work, but I'm addicted to Issey Miyake. Issey is the artist. When I travel I search out the Issey venues because Maxfield [the local purveyor of Miyake] doesn't buy him well."

Such highly cultivated tastes are but one gauge by which to measure the distance Mitchell has traveled since her childhood in Saskatoon, Canada, a place, she recalls, where "everybody was poor." Her father managed a small grocery store in Maidstone, a hamlet without running water. Her mother taught school - "one room, all grades, no books." Church was the social center of life. But Mitchell bailed out early. "I left the church because I loved stories from an early age, but I like them to have some logic. And the story of Adam and Eve didn't make any sense, so I contested it. ADAM AND EVE HAD TWO SONS, CAIN AND ABEL. AND CAIN KILLED ABEL, AND THEN HE MARRIED. Who did he marry? Eve? My Sunday-school teacher's response was to hurt my feelings in some way, and I took on a pouty attitude, and said, "I'm not going back there." Later, however, Mitchell returned to join the choir. "That affected my music because I like the descant part, which has a lot more range and mobility than the melody. It leaps in four- and five-note intervals all over the place. Maybe that's why people have difficulty with my music. I need surprises."

At 21, Mitchell married. "I had had a child, and I was broke, literally penniless," she offers. "And I met Chuck Mitchell, and he said he would take us on. I was kind of railroaded...we were never suitable. I went down the aisle saying, 'I can get out of this.'" And she did - after giving up her child, a daughter, for adoption.

Although Mitchell fared better with her second marriage, to bassist turned producer Larry Klein, the two separated, after ten years together, in 1992. "We've come through this thing," she says. "It's poignant sometimes. We went out the other night. He was playing with Shawn Colvin, and they invited me to come down and sit in. You have to readjust. I imagine that it will be a lifetime friendship."

According to Mitchell, success has not made her personal life easy. "It's tricky, especially because I fall in love with poor men...something happens to men when they become prosperous."

Last year, Mitchell's mother introduced her to Donald Freed, a 45-year-old writer-in-residence in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, who is now Mitchell's beau. "He's a regional singer-songwriter and a prairie mutt like me - Scottish, Swedish, French, and three Indian bloods," says Mitchell.. "He has a post in the library, and anyone can come to him to show him their writing for advice. His income is meager, but I wouldn't say he was struggling. He just doesn't live this life."

Although Freed has spent time in Bel Air, L.A. is not for him. "He went screaming out of here," reports Mitchell. "And I don't blame him." More welcome ground is the stone cottage Mitchell built for herself 25 years ago in British Columbia. "It's my hermitage," she says. "I try to spend three or four months a year there."

Although it's unclear whether Mitchell will marry again, she appears to be happy with Freed. "It took Donald a while to get used to me," she says. "In the beginning he would just stand there and stare at me a lot. But then he addressed himself to Joan from Saskatoon, and the things that we have in common. Our bond is made that way. He's a companion for the sweetest, simplest things - a walk in the park. Maybe it's because I'm middle-aged, but there's no more fire in going into a bar and watching the door....

"I'm 51, and I've just had one of the most enjoyable years of my life. My bleeding years are behind me. Now I have rich people's problems, and you can't make songs out of rich people's problems. A lot of the songs on TURBULENT INDIGO are like Shakespearean soliloquies in a way - they require almost Method acting to get into. And I feel lighter than I ever have right now. I want to write some songs that are less dramatic...I want to sing with a smile on my face."

And then Joni Mitchell picks up the guitar on her kitchen table and does precisely that.