In November 2009, Rhino Entertainment will be releasing a Joni Mitchell box set. The 4CD/1DVD-package will have over 85 songs, from the mid-sixties up to Joni's last album "Shine". Several unreleased songs and alternate versions will be included, plus very rare and previously unissued video performances spanning Joni's incomparable career. Joni will be contributing notes to the package and overseeing the photo edit and design.

Instead of traditional liner notes, Joni would like to invite the online Joni Mitchell-community to send in a statement of why they enjoy the music. It can be one sentence or a short paragraph and the best will be chosen for the liner notes for the project. It can be a personal experience with the music or why in general you like it.

Here are some notes from Joni herself on working the box set :

"The tapes from my first record have been in David Crosby's possession all these years - it's like a miracle that they didn't go up in smoke or something. And there are a lot of [unreleased] songs from back then that would be impossible for me to sing now - they're really ingenue works. There also are some bits of banter between Crosby and me on the first record. And there is in existence the fledgling flight of 'Both Sides Now' at the Second Fret in Philadelphia.

There are tracks from the Mingus album, which was cut with four of five different bands; with some of them I do better vocal performances. I wanted to come into jazz and take it somewhere. There are some tracks where I don't take it anywhere, that are just straight meat-and-potatoes jazz where I'm actually singing better than I did [on the commercially released tracks]. The album I put out is a little more out there.

There's a lot of other stuff back there as well. For instance, the first album was a conceptual album. I had so much material that the first side is called 'I Came To The City' and the second side is called 'Out Of The City & Down To The Seaside'. It's that same recurring theme: What are cities doing to nature? There are [unreleased] songs from that era, one of them called 'Jeremy', which is a nice song about a kid thrown into prison for pot.

There also are [unreleased songs with] pretty melodies and 'tunesmithy' lyrics. I've always been called a folk singer, from the time I made my first record. I've only recorded two folk songs in my whole career, but I used to sing folk songs before I began to write, and there are [tapes] of those - and that's kind of interesting. It's a piece of the evolution that's missing from [my] records."