With her long blond locks falling naturally over a stylish suit, Joni Mitchell sits in her manager's office on a cool California afternoon, looking happy and relaxed. While she chats, she chain-smokes.

"It is a bad habit, but it's not a nervous one," she insists. "I just like to have something in my hands."

She laughs mischievously. For someone with such a "serious artist" reputation, Joni Mitchell's speech is surprisingly well peppered with laughter and jokey asides. She hoots when asked about her involvement with Northern Lights for Africa, the Canadian version of Band Aid that teamed her with the likes of Bryan Adams, Neil Young and Oscar Peterson.

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was literally starving when we did the session. Pretty ironic, considering the subject matter. My yoga teacher— this is all California nonsense - had sent me to a psychic dietitian who, while rubbing her chin and swinging her arm around in a circle, had diagnosed a lot of food allergies. The result was that I was hardly allowed to eat anything. So by the time I arrived with an apple and a rice patty, my poor stomach was making all these strange noises. And then we get in the studio and the engineer says he can't record 'cause he's picking up some weird rumbling sound from my direction."

Mitchell has regained a few pounds since then and seems in no immediate danger of fading away. On the contrary, the normally reclusive artist is now eager to talk on just about any topic, including her most recent album, Dog Eat Dog.

"It's definitely different from anything I've ever done before," she says. "It was also the hardest record I've ever made for a number of reasons. There's a lot of blood on those tracks. These are dangerous times, and I suddenly felt a sense of responsibility to speak up now or forever hold my peace."

For anyone at all familiar with Mitchell's work during the past 20 years or so, from her early folk days through her collaboration with jazz great Charles Mingus, this, her 14th LP, may indeed come as something of a surprise. Its tone is angry and overtly political - a far cry from her last album, the ultraromantic Wild Things Run Fast.

"Yes, well, it's certainly not what most people expect from me," she concedes "I'm talking about everything from the insane arms race to the current attempts to censor lyrics by various extreme rightwingers. Basically, I feel that a lot of strides were made in this country during the '60s - equal rights, feminism, freedom of speech, etc. - but under Reagan's new conservatism, much of that's being eroded and undone.

"For instance," she continues, "I think all these censorship attempts are really dangerous. I hate to see the country backsliding into extremism, and that's exactly what's happening today, sadly. The rock 'n' roll lyric issue is just the tip of the iceberg."

Songs from her album, including the title track and "Ethiopia", don’t pull any punches in addressing some of Mitchell’s newly voiced public concerns. A song called "Tax Free" features Rod Steiger as a flamboyant Moral Majority-style evangelist advocating the invasion of Cuba. Her jaundiced view of the current state of affairs is explored in "The Three Great Stimulants" - not, as you might expect, ex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but rather "artifice, brutality, and innocence."

"Innocence has always been a stimulant," she says, "especially when a culture is entering a decadent period. You get kiddie-porn, the cult of the youth, an obsession with youth, in fact, and stuff like face-lifts - yech!" She wrinkles up her own 42 year old natural features in disgust.

The gloomy side of the album is tempered however, by her old-style, personal insights in songs such as "Good Friends," an uptempo duet with ex-Doobie Michael McDonald, and the appealing "Lucky Girl," whose self described "happy Hollywood ending" unashamedly crows over Mitchell's marriage to her bassist and coproducer, Larry Klein.

It is her second marriage. Her first, to Detroit musician Chuck Mitchell, took place in the mid-'60s and ended in divorce within a couple of years. "We just gradually drifted apart," she says. 'This time round it's a lot different.

"We get on really great," she says of her life with Klein, "and married life is certainly agreeing with me. Of course, when you live together and work together all the time, there's the inevitable tensions and silly little arguments, but I think we're very good for each other. It helps that we're both in the same business. Being a musician as well, he understands us temperamental 'artistes.' I mean, if I had to go off on the road by myself all the time, I'd get very lonely and a bit crazy probably."

Their last tour took them out on the road for more than nine months, "which can be pretty daunting," Mitchell admits, "but I really enjoyed myself. It was like one big happy family and very integrated. Everyone got on well together, which is important in these situations. When I tour this year, I want to go on the road with pretty much the same band.

"Larry's given me a very stable home life," she sums up with a smile. "I've been very busy just living for the past three years or so. People tend to say, 'Oh, you've been laying low - we haven't seen your photo in the papers much.' But the thing is, to be a writer, you need to be slightly invisible, and you need to live and go where ordinary people are. To be 'a star' means that no longer are you the watcher; you're the watched. And when you're being watched it's very hard to create. I'm more of a watcher."

She finally re-entered the public eye with Dog Eat Dog. During the production of the album she took tight control over the studio sessions, leading to "a definite clash of temperament" with British electropopster Thomas Dolby, who had been called in as a technical adviser.

"Well, I'm very fond of him, but man!" She pauses carefully, as if reliving the frustration. "He was very quiet - and stubborn - and when we disagreed, we'd have these discussions and he'd say, "well, I'm not getting anything out of these adult talks, Joan,' and then I'd say, 'Well then, neither am I,' and we'd be stalemated.

"I'm basically unproducible" she explains with a sigh, "and used to letting my albums take their own eccentric course, for better or worse, making my own mistakes. But this time, in order to make the technological leap, I needed assistance. And that's why Thomas was called in.

"The problem was that in all my records, the structure of any song is usually laid down by acoustic guitar or piano first, and then I bring in other players and just give them the freedom to blow and countermelody against that. Sometimes I edit them, some times I just take their parts and move 'em around. So basically, I gather all this material and then collage it in afterwards.

"The advantage is that it keeps spirits up in the studio and saves me from having to give a lot of verbal instruction. That's the way I'm used to working, so when Thomas came in and immediately started building and building tracks, it just drove me crazy," says the singer. "I'd say, You know why you were hired, to set up sounds on the computer, so please get off the keyboards and let me play.' Sometimes it would just fall on deaf ears, and we never used those tracks 'cause I just can't work that way, and I couldn't give over that much territory."

In the end, she didn't have to. She stuck to her guns and made her own decisions. "I felt very mixed up about it, I must confess," she says. "On one level, I thought, perhaps I'm not being very cooperative about it, but on the other I thought, no, this is composition, and if my structure is radically altered at the beginning, I don't want to be interior-decorated out of my own music. I've always had the luxury of making my own mistakes, and that's something important to protect."

Now that Dog Eat Dog is finished and in the stores, Mitchell is gearing up for a six-month tour to promote the record, beginning this summer—"if they can drag me away from my easel," she laughs.

"Painting's become a bigger and bigger part of my life, especially over the past five years," she says. "In fact, I've painted more in the last three years than in my entire life - and I've been painting all my life. People don't know it, but I only became interested in music much later."

Her commitment to painting is so strong that it has occasionally threatened her music career. "You know, when it came to signing my current record deal, I almost quit then. I mean, I'd been at it since the mid '60s and I suddenly felt it was time to stop and just pursue my painting, which was going quite well. When we toured in '83, they actually had to threaten me to put my paints away and go into rehearsals. I'd much rather have stayed home and continued painting. Although once I got into it and then out on the road again it was okay.

"But the moment I got back home again, I went straight into the thick of the pigments again."

The singer says she has been particularly influenced by the painter Georgia O'Keefe, whom she visited at her home in New Mexico a few years ago. "The whole trip was very inspirational," Mitchell explains. "I started painting like mad the moment I got home again.

"I was working on my Mingus album at the time," she recalls, "and I went to visit her and ended up staying for five days. She was a pretty fascinating character and quite superstitious. I remember when I arrived at her front door, she opened it before saying anything to me, turned to her housekeeper and commented, 'Did you see what time she arrived at?' Apparently the sun had just set behind the mountains at that precise moment, and to Georgia it was a very good omen.

"So my timing was good, I guess," she laughs. "Anyway, we had dinner. Everything was home cooked and delicious, and I had the distinct feeling she was checking me out. The funny thing was I'd bought all these Indian things - ankle bells and rattles - in Santa Fe on my way there. I was just dying to go up to my room and try them on. But I didn't want to appear rude and just leave her there, and she kept chatting away. But in the end I thought, what the hell, so I put them all on and then let out a few chants and leapt around the room. She just stood there leaning on her cane, staring at me, saying, 'You're a pretty curious visitor.'

"Early the next day, O'Keefe woke her up early for a long walk in the country. "She was amazingly energetic for a woman in her 90s," Mitchell marvels. "She's racing along this road, and of course I'm chain smoking all the way, trying to keep up with her. She suddenly stops and says, 'You shouldn't smoke.'

"Her housekeeper, Juan, said in surprise, 'Georgia, you don't usually tell people what they should do.' And Georgia turned to me and said sternly, 'Well, you should live.'

"Of course, I'm still smoking."