Siquomb is the name of a Red Indian tribe. [editor's note: there is no evidence of this, but it is an acronym Joni came up with: She Is Queen Undisputed of Mind Beauty] It is also the name of the company which publishes all songs written by Joni Mitchell and Joni owns Siquomb publishing - which means she is a very rich young Canadian, to the tune of several million dollars.

"But really" she says frankly, "I feel guilty about having all of this. I'd like to give a portion of my money to some good causes, but how do I know that the money will actually be used for everybody's benefit?"

Ecology - the preservation of birds, bees, trees, and just nature in general is Joni's big hang-up. Not because it is particularly trendy but because she's delicately concerned about life going on undisturbed.

"Living in Low Anglese, smog choked Los Angeles is bad enough," she once told me, "But the last straw came when I visited Hawaii for the first time. It was night-time when we got there so I didn't get my first view of the scenery until I got up the next morning. The hotel room was quite high up so in the distance I could see the Pacific Ocean, "I walked over to the balcony and there was the picture book scenery, palm trees swaying in the breeze and all. When I looked down and there below my view, was this ugly, concrete car park on the hotel grounds. I thought, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. That is how the song "Big Yellow Taxi" was born - I just had to draw attention to what's going down all around us. When I recorded it, I made it into a late rock and roll parody thing, just to show how absurd it is to destroy nature like that." "Big Yellow Taxi" landed Joni on the NME singles charts for the first time.

Joni - who was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta 26 years ago is extremely sensitive - not just to her own feelings, but to those who are close to her. She didn't actually go to Woodstock, which inspired her to write the song of that name, but her closest boyfriends, CSNY did and they told her how it felt to be there when they got back.

If one did not have a more complex understanding of Mitchell's creative voice, her sensitivity to life is captured through the atmosphere she translates into a song about the "half million golden children of God gathered in His Garden, to state, a better way must come of all this! The Mitchell version of "Woodstock" on her "Ladies of the Canyon" LP - currently number 18 on this week's album chart - is very different from the way David, Stephen, Graham, and Neil have rocked it up. Both versions of the song have their own validity. The group sings it like they saw it and Joni sings it like she felt it - by proxy, some would say, however, by feeling, the song was born!

Another, "Ladies of the Canyon" song, titled, "For Free" is Joni's "get-out" for the guilt feelings she has about her wealth, according to Allan MacDougall. Whatever a "get-out" might mean, Mitchell finds herself consciously faced with the paradox of singing about a new world that is not based upon material achievement and yet her achievement provided material wealth that was not anticipated as she created these marvelous anthems of a higher civilized love and life function! "For Free" reveals a conscious human being unable to ignore the waves of levels of life and how they expose the contradictions of all that we profess in our desire to be that spiritually pure self only hinted to us in our childhood instruction on religion.

Mitchell says, "this song came to me when I was in New York. I was out shopping one day, and there was a street musician - what you would call a 'busker' - playing on the corner, He was playing real good and for free. But nobody wanted to know him. I thought, here's me, who plays for fortunes, and who drives to shows in big limousines, who plays either for friends or for those who can afford to go to my shows; and then there is this clarinet player - who probably knows more about music than I will ever learn - and he is playing for free!"

"I went back to that street corner another time but he was gone. All my friends in New York are looking out for him, because I would like to get together with him some day."

When Joni was at school in Canada, she never thought about being a singer or a composer, she wanted to be an artist, somehow, she picked up a guitar and Pete Seeger's "Teach Yourself Guitar" record, and well the rest is history. She never quite got around to learning the proper tuning of a guitar, because her own unique tuning kept interrupting other influences and she discovered tunings that matched her own voice. Her singing whether guitar or accompanying piano, perfected her method for preserving her thoughts and dreams as she created new songs.

She still paints - more so now than ever, now that she's in a state of semi-retirement. The last public performance Joni gave was in London's Festival Hall. "That was a great way to bring the curtain down on that particular direction of my life," she told me. The capacity crowd gave her perhaps the most rapturous reception she'd ever had to date. The British love Joni and the admiration is mutual. "I guess that's partly due to my ancestors coming from over here, but mainly because there just seems to be no hassles, no tension, I just hope all the British people realize how very lucky they are."