If you're looking for human weakness, it's easily located anywhere, but if strength is what you're seeking, it can only be found within. It seems it's never too late to learn such lessons. Consider, for instance, a recent impromptu face-off in a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe between an older artist of heart and mind and a young musician in danger of losing such vital faculties.

"There was one table available at the back," the female artist recalls of the encounter in the restaurant, "right next to what looked to be a rock'n'roller and his manager. It turned out to be a rock'n'roller and his A&R man. I had to sit close to them, and here's this kid in punk drag, tatooed, with dog bracelets on his wrists and around his neck, and his hair is spray-netted up. Basically, he's a Midwestern nerd who's become a yuppie. He's talking to the A&R guy, and his band is broken up, and he's trying to come up with something new. He says he didn't like the band 'sonically,' but all his considerations are to the fan bloc. He sounded like an accountant.

"There's barely enough room between us for the waiter to set my coffee down at my table," the woman artist continues, "so I can't help but overhear this kid, who's at a crossroads here, and the other guy was encouraging him to be inspired. I finally had enough."

So she impulsively entered what had previously been a two-man talk by addressing some off-the-cuff remarks to the yuppie punk. "I called him on his lack of originality," she says, also telling him "that he was in this rock'n'roll costume that had nothing to do with who he was, but he didn't have the courage of his own individuality. I said he had disguised himself and didn't really like the music he was making. I said, 'Do you want to be an artist or a star? I can answer that question by just looking at you—you'll do anything to fit. And the considerations that you're making guarantee that you're gonna be feeding the gristmill with more of this crap.'

"He said, 'Well, I don't want to wake up broke at 48. It's good to have some business sense.' I said, 'Yeah, it's good to have some business sense after, but not at the point when you're making your art. Mr. A&R here is more of an artist than you are. Do you know how great it is to be told by your record company to be experimental? And you didn't even respond correctly to that. You go right back into your business head! [She laughs] Are you crazy?'

"He said, 'Look, rock'n'roll is supposed to be dumb.' I said, 'Huh? Chuck Berry wasn't dumb, Bob Dylan's rock wasn't dumb. Hardly anybody else can reach such high standards. But at least try. Otherwise, when you wake up with little money in your pocket at 48 and you look at the dumb work, you'll have spent your whole life making shit while there's been spikes sticking out of you—all of which isn't you at all.'

"He said, 'You hate me!' [She laughs] I said, 'I don't hate you. I hate the music that's on the radio, because there's no muse to it—it's just ick!'

"He said, 'Why are you judging me so harshly? Who are you to judge me?' I said, 'That's what I hear from your generation all the time: 'Who are you to judge me?' The trouble is that nobody judged you, nobody told you how to judge your own work and judge yourself. You don't know how to think for yourself.'

"He said, 'You don't how I am. You don't know my work.' I said, 'I'm sitting next to your table, listening to how your head works. I don't even have to hear your musical work to know that if you're the fountainhead, then it's more of this crap. And you don't know who I am!'

"Then they both went, in unison, [glumly] 'Yes, we do.' And I went, 'Oh.' I thought I was just this anonymous granny, like, attacking [She laughs]."

For the record, the 57-year-old artist on the offensive was and is Joni Mitchell, recounting another afternoon spent as a free woman in Los Angeles. And as she bade goodbye to the two anonymous gentlemen in the restaurant, she realized that she was one more conversation closer to a decision about her own artistic future.

"The willingness to do anything to stay in the news—that's the formula now," Mitchell says. "But no real artist has the stomach for all that commodification. I'm not ambitious to be a bigger star, and we live in a decadent time when people shrug about misogyny or that there are crooks in power. The worst ideas are in first place, and the best are in obscurity. Me, I'm eager for more growth in myself, but I'm willing to wait as it develops. As the I Ching says, 'Inferior people are in power. Hide your light.' An artist will do as much as possible to survive but as little as possible every day to sell oneself. I can't write songs in this climate. I'm basically phasing out; I'm retiring again. I'm a painter, and I got derailed into this other game, and so I'm going back to my paints."

What has Mitchell painted recently? "I did a portrait of my daughter and my grandchildren and me, flying, Peter Pan-like, over Paris," she says, smiling. "That's the last one I did."

An only child, Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson Nov. 7, 1943, in Fort McLeod, Alberta. Mitchell (whose surname stems from a brief first marriage) had a daughter in 1965 and later gave the child up for adoption. In the decades since, Joni made several attempts to relocate her offspring but was hindered by Canada's adoption secrecy laws. Her daughter (alluded to in such Mitchell songs as "Little Green") was simultaneously searching for her mother and obtained enough vital background data to establish their blood links. In a 1997 meeting between Joni and her daughter, a former model named Kilauren Gibb, the family ties were confirmed, and Mitchell learned she had a grandson, the now 8-year-old Marlin. Two years ago her granddaughter, Daisy, was born.

Unfortunately, this reunion has at times been publicly overshadowed by widely circulated misinformation, including facts that were actually about namesakes of Mitchell's. As an example, she says, "There is a Joni Mitchell in California whose surrogate carried the baby for her. People have written about this as if I am that same person, but obviously I'm not. That's been the most dramatic instance of these sorts of reckless assumptions.

"But such things can get repeated forever," Mitchell notes, expressing her disappointment with a media culture she feels is steeped in misunderstandings as often as "poor judgment and bad curation." Pointing to an artist she's admired and referenced in her own work, Mitchell says, "They still say that Van Gogh had painted all wiggly because he was insane. But these things are not true. It's actually a matter of Van Gogh's brush style, coming in on an angle, and the colors that he used, because he was an extraordinary color psychologist.

"If you read Van Gogh's letters," Mitchell continues, "you know that all of this was a purely an artistic consideration. He was epileptic, yes; and he drank too much absinthe; and yes, he ended up in an institution. And certainly, emotional disturbances probably gave his [brush] strokes some power—just like an angry drummer. But all you have to do to understand this is read his letters, his statements on his own behalf."

As Van Gogh wrote during his artistically superlative but personally distressed period (1889-90) in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, "We live in such a disturbed time that there can be no way of having opinions fixed enough to form any judgment of things . . . I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky [Starry Night, June 1889]. When you have looked at these two studies for some time, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and I sometimes used to talk about. It is not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no. By color and a more spontaneous drawing than delusive precision, one could express the purer nature of a countryside compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris."

As for Mitchell's own brilliant oeuvre, it's still undergoing curation and restoration. "My [1982-91] Geffen catalog has been buried for 10 years," she says. "Then they sold it to Sony, and Sony sold it to Seagram's. Some of those albums [Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, Night Ride Home] have been out of print, and I wasn't sure Universal even knew they had them, so I called them up to tell them! We're working on rereleases with some extra tracks. I didn't leave much behind back then, but there's things I did just for fun during the Geffen years, like a version of 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.'"

Mitchell also reveals plans for a major orchestral project as a sequel to her Grammy-winning 2000 Both Sides Now set of chanteuse-style interpretations of great jazz and pop songs.

"I'm recording 24 of my songs, with handpicked players from the [London] Philharmonic and some of the BBC's players to make the strongest orchestra we can put together in London. We did the last one that way, and now we're doing a two-record set of new arrangements of my music that we'll record in November for Reprise."

Which songs has she selected for the program? "The ones that have classical compositional aspects," she says, citing "Coyote," "The Sire of Sorrow (Job's Sad Song)," "Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Tune)," "For the Roses," "Just Like This Train," and "The Last Time I Saw Richard."

"Also," she adds, " 'Refuge of the Roads,' for instance, translates really beautifully to this approach, as does 'Borderline' and 'Cherokee Louise.' We're also doing 'The Dawntreader' from my first record. I'm just distilling what I think are essential songs in terms of my best writing but bearing in mind what translates to symphonic production."

Does Mitchell know what she's going to name the new album? "Well, I've been quitting since I entered this business—since I wrote 'That Song About the Midway' [from Clouds, 1969]," she allows with a chuckle. "So in my current state of mind, I'm thinking of calling it Swan Song."