"Heart and humor and humility,"
He said, "will lighten up your heavy load."
I left him then for the refuge of the roads.
- "Refuge of the Roads," 1976

It takes cheerful resignation
Heart and humility
That's all it takes
A cheerful person told me.
- "Moon at the Window," 1982

It's taken Joni Mitchell six years to recognize the wisdom of the advice she rejected at the end of Hejira. During the interim, I pretty much stopped listening to her re- cords; to judge from her. declining . sales, a lot of other people did, too. Let's not kid ourselves that this was a case of an experimental performer whose work was going over the heads of hoi polloi. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977) and Mingus (1979) failed to find an audience not because they were too avant-garde but because they were bad records, full of the "sophomore jive" and "Negro affectations" Mitchell had derided on The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975).

The higher Mitchell's anima rose, the more gaseous her music became. Don Juan ranks among the most ponderously epic, filibustering albums ever recorded. Mingus proved a well-intentioned but wrongheaded homage - effete, unswinging, and naive, it was everything that Charles Mingus's music was emphatically not. The ambition that had made Mitchell one of the most admirable songwriters of the early and mid '70s puffed into self-importance; the confessionalism that had made her so moving cheapened into self-display. Mitchell had never been at-a loss for ego. Here was a woman, after all, who had managed in one song, "Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Tune)" on 1972's For the Roses, to identify not only with Beethoven but with Sylvia Plath and Jesus Christ. But by 1980, she seemed to possess little but delusions of grandeur.

Mitchell's belated rediscovery of "heart. and humor and humility" makes Wild Things Run Fast (Geffen) her finest album since Hejira and her most commercial since Court and Spark (1974). The opening measures of the first cut, "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody," herald a return to the rich, rolling sonorities of Hejira. The lyrics, comparing Mitchell's solitary lot to that of a long-married friend from childhood, also hearken back to that album, particularly "Song for Sharon." But there's none of the hipper-than-thou contempt for the bourgeoisie that made much of The Hissing of Summer Lawns seem so smug. The Christmas lights sparkling on the lawn in "Chinese Cafe" beckon wistfully. No 'longer pretending to be Don Juan's hellraising daughter, a sadder but wiser Mitchell is more humane toward others and more honest with herself: 'Carol, we're middie-class/We're middle- aged." Weaving in and out of the song's swirls are not only snatches of "Unchained Melody" - an exquisitely ironic touch, since Mitchell's lament is that no one can break the bonds of time - but also lines from "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and, during the fade, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes."

Yet Mitchell is not beating a nostalgic retreat back to Judy Collins's territory. Kicking off with a witty allusion to Julius Caesar ("He came/She 'smiled"') - and concluding with a hilarious one to the Troggs ('Wild thing/I thought you loved me"), the ensuing title track bolts out of the stable with new-wave zest. Every time "Wild Things Run Fast" slows down to catch its breath, Steve Lukather's guitar goads it on or Larry Williams's synthesizer whomps it on the backside. Mitchell squeezes a lot of musical dynamics into this song's mere two minutes, and she's equally economical, here and throughout the album, with her words. She's reined in her prosy prolixity, curbed her elliptical poetastery and learned once again how to express herself directly and precisely. One verse of 'Chinese Cafe," for example, says more about Indians and ecology, and says it more compellingly, than 16 minutes of Don Juan's "Paprika Plains."

Mitchell's friskiness also refreshes Wild Things Run Fast. She doesn't seem to have had so much fun in the studio since Court and Spark - and then the good time was David Geffen's (on "Free Man in Paris"), The glee with which she whoops "Hot dog, darlin!" amid the stuttering rhythms and acoustic folkiness of "Solid Love," or "Yes I do - I love ya!" on "Underneath the Streetlight," is as infectious as a fit of giggles.

Such girlishness may prevent Wild Things from plumbing the profondeurs of an album like Hejira. There's no carefully cultivated existential Angst here, just everyday anxiety. Nor are there any of the head games that Mitchell used to play as she sought to escape the mental constraints of gender. But why do you have to be a man in order to be taken (or, more important still, - to take yourself) seriously? Wild Things isn't superficial - indeed, it's inspiring - because an artist who-had willed herself into icy androgeny has decided that it's okay to be a girl - and a woman. "Why do you keep on trying to make a man of me?", Mitchell complains on the slinky 'Ladies' Man," and then launches into a sultry chorus of overdubbed moans that are bluesier. than anything she has recorded. On "Man to Man," with James Taylor providing the background vocals, she protests that the revolving door of her love life has left her numb and uncaring. Shuttling from "man to man to man" has turned her into a man, when what she really longs to be is "woman to man."

It's unlikely that Mitchell will ever become an earth mother, but her new awareness (or acceptance) of her femininity has certainly thawed her vocals. The adolescent innocence with which she sings "Unchained Melody" and her breathy vulnerability on "Ladies' Man" melt the mannered sang-froid of her performances on Mingus. Indeed, Wild Things could be construed as an indictment of the suave, self-absorbed masculinity of jazz. "Be Cool" is an ironic bill of particulars that presents Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone as Exhibit A. The way Shorter flutters noncommittally over the tune, never dipping beneath its surface, is dramatically and diametrically opposed to the emotional engagement Wild Things cries out for.

Not that Mitchell has spurned jazz entirely. There's the darting melody of 'Moon at the Window," for instance, on which 'Shorter again tootles obbligatos. And Mitchell's new bass player, Larry Klein (from Freddy Hubbard's band), unostentatiously echoes Jaco Pastorius, her collaborator from Hejira through Mingus. But along with her womanliness, Mitchell has rediscovered the ebullience of rock and roll. You can almost see her grin and shake her hips as the chorus of "Underneath the Streetlight" revs into the refrain of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary." "You Dream Flat Tires" rocks harder still, and the only bug in its engine is the clichéd whine of Mike Landau's guitar. Landau appears on four tracks on Wild Things and screws up two of them, the second being an update of "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care." Although the Buddy Holly cover makes sense thematically, since Wild Things is about not being cool, Landau's lead guitar is distorted sludge.

Where do rock and roll and womanhood and "heart and humor and humility" finally lead Mitchell on Wild Things? To the Bible. The album's last track, "Love," is a free translation of I Corinthians 13 - the chapter with the famous line "For now we see through a glass, darkly." It's at once hippy-dippy and pretentious to end a record with Scripture and a song entitled "Love." As if it made her uncomfortable, too, Mitchell's vocal, for the first time on the album, seems self-conscious, and the amorphous arrangement, once again featuring Shorter's soprano sax, sounds artful rather than heartfelt. And yet it is fitting that Wild Things ends with Mitchell regretting the day she "put away childish things." The album is by no means a regression, but it is a rejection of the false sophistication that made Don Juan and Mingus so off-putting. Now, once again, like a child but also like a true artist, Joni Mitchell is confronting life and herself "face to face."