KPFK Interview

KPFK-FM
August 3, 2004

Transcribed from the audio by Lindsay Moon

Aired August 3, 2004

Aura Bogado: Good afternoon and welcome to this very special edition of Radioactive on KPFK. I'm Aura Bogado.

It's been said that when the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand out as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century. She's been called uncompromising and iconoclastic, and has confounded expectations at every creative turn. Restlessly innovative, her music covers all genres, from personal folk stylings to jazz to avant garde to world music and beyond. Fiercely independent, her work has resisted the whims of both mainstream pop audiences and the male dominated recording industry. On the arrival of her new album "The Beginning of Survival," it is my profound honor to introduce to today's program painter, poet, singer and songwriter, Miss Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell: I'm pleased to be here.

AB: Now, your new album features tracks that comment on this world that we live in today. It's 2004, George Bush is president, not by popular vote, we're at war, again. We have a rising debt, AIDS is killing Africa. It seems to be that anywhere you turn in the world there's a lot going on, and these examples just start to scratch at the surface.

Now, if I was to go through your repertoire and choose songs that I deemed politically active, so to speak, I might very well choose a very different set of music, although there would definitely be some overlap with this album.

So how did you go about compiling such an album? Was it just by memory or were you in the basement going reel to reel or how did that happen?

JM: Um, well, actually the catalyst was listening to your show and public radio in general, kind of dialing around at a certain time while I was painting the album art for this project and also a Rhino project which is more towards the more popular aspect of my music.

I'm just trying -- how did I -- I'm just trying to focus myself because there's a lot of reasons, but I wanted to make a contemporary statement, and I haven't written since '97 and this work basically was dismissed -- most of it was written in the Reagan era, when journalism basically had become ostrich-like and nobody was really sticking their neck out. We have a very conservative, politically correct period again where very few people have the nerve, like, that Reverend Sharpton did (laughs) to be an individuated speaker, to speak really gut level and heart level. Something invisible is holding people back. Threat of job loss -- well, it's not even that invisible in this particular government. People seem to be punished at the moment that they're outspoken. You know, they've lost something the next day. So they're getting more than a wrist slapping.

And in free America, you know, theoretically, this is unprecedented. So it's a dangerous time for freedom in America. It's a case of 'use it or lose it,' you know. There were things that I had written back in the Reagan era that were dismissed, like I say, either as negative or sophomoric as if you're supposed to park your social consciousness at the curb as you enter into second year university, you know, and become a citizen. And numb and dumb and clam-lipped or something. They did the same thing to Sharpton the other night, like 'aren't you being very negative?' That's the great defense for anything that might be said that is too individuated, you know, or going against the conservative grain.

So -- and I also heard songs on your station being unearthed when the war began from the Vietnam war. I was telling you earlier, during the Vietnam war, those songs seemed inappropriate in that they attacked the soldier. I didn't quite see it that way as a young hippie girl, and so I booked myself into Fort Bragg and I played repeatedly for the soldiers coming and going, 'kill a Commie for God' type, certainly not my philosophy, but I did get to kind of understand, you know, that they were brainwashed in that particular region in that particular way and then they would come back all demoralized from the war saying, you know, this is Charlie's turf, you know, give him a bobby pin, he'll wipe out a whole platoon. You know, it's really his right, you know. We're fighting on his ground.

So it was an interesting perspective at that time, and "The Beat of Black Wings" is written out of that war but not the way writers were -- not in so much a typical blame the soldier anti war kind of thing. I don't blame the soldier. You know, a lot of times they have to go over there and experience to realize, you know, how hideous war is and why it must be a last resort and it shouldn't be jumped into, you know, like an eager beaver.

AB: Now, I would agree with you there's a signal of a world out of balance, it's definitely war. In the last few years, we've seen full blown occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq led by the United States and so-called coalition forces. You do have that song on this record that you just talked about, "The Beat of Black Wings," and the opening line starts, "I met a young soldier, he said his name was Killer Kyle, he was shakin' all over, like a night frightened child."

Let's hear "The Beat of Black Wings" from Joni Mitchell's "The Beginning of Survival."

(Music up.)

AB: "The Beat of Black Wings" from Joni Mitchell's new record "The Beginning of Survival."

In the song you say, "this is his story, it's a tough one for me to sing." What is the story behind this song? Who is Killer Kyle?

JM: In the '60s, before I had a record deal, there were a lot of social protest songs being written. I was mostly writing love songs at that time. I hadn't had my political awakening. I was a seeker, interested in things spiritual but, you know, politics sort of evaded me and I almost thought like a Native woman, you know, leave it to the men (laughs), you know? It's kind of like men's business. Anyway -- but I didn't think that it was a good solution to soldier out -- to single out and blame the soldiers, which was a lot of the focus on the songs that were being written at that time like "The Universal Soldier" or "I Ain't Marching Anymore," which I heard being played on this station as the war began. I thought, no, no, I've got to get "The Beat of Black Wings" to them because it's more -- it's the soldier coming back from the war.

Well, Killer Kyle one night appeared in my dressing room in Fort Bragg. I decided to go down and check it out. I played to the Navy in Charleston and I played to the soldiers coming and going at Fort Bragg. And they were nice men but they were, you know, I come from Canada -- I always think it's bluenecks and rednecks. It's kind of the same stock. You know, I come from soldier people. You know, my uncles all went into the war and, you know, one didn't come back, so, you know, we always approved of -- there's sympathy there for the soldiers, not so much blame, you know?

Anyway, Killer Kyle was in my dressing room one night when I came off stage and he was shaking, you know, like it says in the song, "he was shaking all over, like a night frightened ..." -- his fists were clenched, his face was red and he said in a thick Tennessee accent, I believe, you know, "You've got a lot of nerve, sister, standing up there singing those songs about love, because there ain't no love and I'm going to tell you where love went." And he told me about being in Vietnam, signing over with his brother. I said I didn't think brothers were allowed in the same platoon. He said, "Well, he wasn't a physical brother but he was my best friend growing up." They ended up in the same platoon. They were going through the -- he was a medic so he was at the end of the line and he had to go into a village and shoot down a well which he did. When he shot down the well, he saw there were two children in a bucket down there so that upset him. You know, the people were -- the enemy were -- he couldn't identify them. The enemy were still kind of beautiful to him. He began to see it as, you know, that they were in the wrong and the people were in the right and he said 'give Charlie a bobby pin, he'll wipe out a platoon' because that's what they did. They set off a hair trigger, the first six men cross over it and when it gets to about the middle it blows. So he survived but he had to pick up the pieces of his brother and put him in a body bag. So he got sent home. And he was basically ready just to go back over and get killed because he saw no future for himself, that his heart had been destroyed and, you know, that his mind had been destroyed.

So firsthand -- I saw stronger soldiers, usually they were captains or people maybe that didn't -- either were well suited to war psychologically or maybe weren't in the thick of that kind of atrocity, you know, maybe it was more -- I don't know. But I saw all different kinds of mentalities coming and going there and so it's not so easy just to blame the soldier but that was kind of his story. And I told it 20 years after he told it to me and here it is 20 years again after that in another war. So I'm sure that there are revelations on the battlefield like that today.

AB: Now, there's a thread of optimism throughout your new album, "The Beginning of Survival," and you've said that this album is a gesture of optimism on the medical -- on the medicine wheel disc. Now, you talk about this medicine wheel as a way to get people to leave a conversation sometimes --

JM: (Laughs.)

AB: -- and that people are unresponsive sometimes when you talk about it. Why?

JM: Well, when I was in my 20s, you know, I was searching everything: Philosophy, psychology, theology, you know, for grounding ideas. And I found very little actually. Especially, you know, in Western thought. Again, psychology, you know, did have the medicine wheel in it a little bit and that was about all I got. That and synchronicity, Jungian psychology, and at the end of his life he dismissed all his work and said, "I only found one good idea, psychological tool, and I got it from the Pueblo Indians."

I think it's a brilliant idea. It should be taught from the first grade on. It's a simple premise and then you live with it and you can use it for so many different things. But the original idea, it's like a -- the attempt to speak a whole truth. In order to speak a whole -- or a chief's wheel or the wheel of becoming. And culturally there were long-term generational plans and then there were individual plans and by birth right you would know what your weak suits were and therefore what you had to build up.

Like if you were very sensitive that means you lack clarity. So you need to develop your clarity to balance out your sensitivity. You know, like if you're a thinker, you know, which the natives called wisdom but really is intellect, it's your data bank. How well do you store and maintain information? You know, if you're in your data bank, you're emotionally atrophied. If you're emotional, you can't get at your data bank from there. So you're bouncing around, unless you're enlightened which is -- although everybody has the possibility, it's highly unlikely that one in 20 million will be (laughs). So in the meantime we have to settle for less than enlightenment. The best we can hope for is humanitarianism. At least to think about other people other than our own niche or something.

And this wheel also teaches, you know, the races, north being intellect which is the White terrain and out of this comes, you know, the scientific predilection. Cold weather people, you have to think more to survive. Equatorial people, the hips loosen up and you have to think less to survive so they become more emotionally sophisticated. To the west or the setting sun, the peoples of the setting sun which, you know, on this wheel are designated as the red race, have increased sensitivity and less clarity. You know, now within their own natural migrations because the red race held onto this idea up until the last century, they had long migrational patterns where they were going to live in the north to develop wisdom or intellect, live on the West Coast, you know, generationally, for many generations to become a more holistic-minded people.

Whereas the White race, for example, from Socrates on, Socrates declared north and east all there was. And designated south and west which is half of perception -- I always like to say to madmen and -women. You know, sensitivity and emotionality.

Now, the Black race, because of their prolonged period closer to the equator, are more advanced emotionally, you know. Call it soul, call it whatever, more physically uninhibited and so on than people who've lived in the cold where, you know, your arms are tight up to your shoulders because you're freezing all the time, you know, but you're thinking, you're thinking: How in this frozen tundra am I going to feed my family? It's not falling off of trees, you know? (Laughs).

But I got to calling it the bombwheel because I thought it was such a good idea and everytime I would bring it up, people would yawn and -- so sometimes I got to using it, like, I'd bring it up if I wanted to clear the room (laughs), but I still think it's one of the best ideas on teaching perception and balancing and the attempt to speak holistically. Like in a court of law 'I know' counts, 'I see' count. 'I feel' doesn't count. 'I sense' doesn't count, even though physics now has caught up, physics because of quantum physics and the chaos theories and all of this is beginning to acknowledge the equality of emotionality and sensitivity or the irrational side of things, right? And so even the scientific mind because of cutting edge physics is going to have to acknowledge eventually that they've been playing with half a deck for quite a while (laughs).

AB: Now, in a place like the U.S., do you think that people of a given race are born with these attributes?

JM: To a degree. I mean there's always -- there's exceptions. And we are more and more, you know, mixed blood, you know. Like I'm a mutt so I'm carrying a lot of different tendencies: Fiery, you know, fight before you think kind of Irish blood. (Laughs). And impassive Norwegian blood and then I've got Native blood through the Norwegian blood, Sami blood. You know which gives me a sensitivity towards nature and a visionary thing, kind of an involuntary global visionary quality which I believe comes from that spark of genetics. You know, and then I've got Scottish blood which is really Viking blood, you know, and that's another warring, you know, swinging their blades, they came flying over to Scotland and whittled down all these people and finally these little kings said 'okay, okay, okay, we'll give you the Shetland Islands,' so the Henderson blood. In the 9th century, my blood was given this scruffy little island with stubby horses. In the 9th century -- in 1905, my uncle Tom came to settle the prairie with his gaggle of stunted horses which are really good for nothing on a farm. They're mean- spirited and you have to feed them but they don't do any work, they don't pull their own. So for a thousand years the Hendersons still raised these stubby little mean ponies that they got for laying down their cutlasses.

AB: Now, let's go a little forward in time. A few years ago several U.S. soldiers raped a schoolgirl in Okinawa, Japan, a land that's been occupied since World War II. There's a song on your album called "No Apologies" that reflects on what happened there and it makes me think of what's happening now in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In the song you ask "so what makes a man a man in these tough times?" What's the answer and will we ever find a suitable answer in times of war?

JM: Well, as near as I can -- what makes a great man -- and there aren't many living today -- but the ones that are living, great, you know, like great leaders -- Mandela for instance. What seems to unfortunately make a great man is years and years of torture. You know, it's almost like you have to be pulled through, die, and get all your rough edges banged off, you know, like, along the way in order to come to that kind of inner quietude where the worst has happened and you've survived it, you know, and transcended it without bitterness. There's the art, that's what separates an ordinary man from a great man, I guess. Because that's hard. And if you should make that transition, from there you would get great leadership.

You know, it seems to me that our leadership in general because of our society -- I'm very critical of this culture in terms of what it's fed. You know, when they say, "Oh, we're really good people and this is an aberration, this is just an isolated incident." I'm surprised if that's true because you have a generation that's come up on Beavis and Butthead, you know, and you dial around and try to find some television where it isn't just really mentally ill. (Laughs.) Good luck. I mean it's just really, you know -- I see America as a country full of adrenalin addicts. You know, here they had peace and what did they do with it? They -- for their own personal entertainment they just watched, you know, huge quantities of the lowest mass -- the elevated mass murderers. There's all this peek-a-boo at horror. It's kind of like they're addicted to squirting their adrenal glands while sitting down. Now, your adrenal gland is a functional gland to make you fight or run. And you have a second to assess which one to do. But you don't just use it for your entertainment. If you do, you know, first of all you're going to run out of adrenalin and when you need to fight or flight, you're not going to have any and -- just sitting there watching horrible images of atrocity and a lot of times too American art depicts the great American superhero. You've got Superman, Superfly, you know, Super Rocky, Super, you know, like and then we send that out all over the world and somehow or other we really have come to believe our own mythologies. Then you get in a war situation and you've taken in so much hideous atrocity, you know, people cutting people up and sewing them together and wearing them and I mean all this stuff is a steady diet. I mean, no culture -- except for the fall of the Roman empire and the blood sports in the arenas, I think it's kind of unprecedented. But it's definitely our taste in art is evident of our decadence.

You know, there's no good news stories. I mean there must be acts of heroism all over the country. Why don't we see -- if we are such good people, why don't we start showing good people? But all we want to look at is not just bad people but really bad people, you know? So it's sick. Our appetites are sick as a people. And they're going out by satellite dish. So Pakistanis, Arabs, everybody knows we're sick. 'Look at that,' you know, 'they're looking at Jerry Springer' and everything. The cat is out of the bag. 'These people are sick!' you know (laughs).

AB: From "The Beginning of Survival," let's take a listen to "No Apologies" from Joni Mitchell.

(Music up.)

AB: You are listening to KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara. This is Radioactive. I'm Aura Bogado, and I'm very honored to have in studio today poet, painter, singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell. We just heard "No Apologies" from her new album "The Beginning of Survival."

Now, Joni, I just got back from the Democratic National Convention in Boston where a very enthusiastic John Kerry sent out very mixed messages at best regarding Iraq and just about everything else. On one hand he said that he wants 40,000 more troops, more kids in Iraq. On the other hand, he's saying that George Bush made this horrible decision to go there. Watching this circus at the DNC firsthand just really confirmed for me that voting for one candidate or the other is just really voting for the king of the empire.

Now, in the past from what I understand you've played benefits for candidates like George McGovern. What do you think of John Kerry and alternate candidates like Ralph Nader, for example?

JM: Well it's hard to tell. What came out after Sharpton's speech is that the Democratic stance is so, well, I guess politics being politics, this is always so, but they were horrified because they had strategized to go the conservative route. That was what the main criticism was. 'No, we all agreed that we were going to go the conservative route.' Well, if they do that then, you know, where do the liberals go? I mean are there any left? There was some liberty in the speech that he took, although he was criticized for that. It was the first evidence of kind of liberty speaking in that camp. I know it's a desperate race and I know that the evangelicals, for instance, are a huge and conservative voting bloc and they've kind of been brainwashed in a certain direction and you need that vote to survive. So politics has got to pander and you've got to give them a little leeway in that direction but, you know, I don't see that much conflict in the two examples you gave of Kerry not wanting to go into the war.

First of all, like in the I Ching, Oriental wisdom says, you want to be a revolutionary? You want to start a war? Ask yourself this question. This is a fundamental mistake that George Bush made I think karmically, spiritually, you know, the laws of nature were against him as he entered into this war on this level. You know, he could not win because this is known; I mean I'm sure Machiavelli covered this. You just don't do this, you know, like if you know anything about victory. Victory was impossible the way he entered into it.

The I Ching says but once in it you've got to deal with it. So I don't see so much of a discrepancy between being against it and wanting to send in more men. Because now we're in a terrible mess, in a quagmire. Nobody knows really what to do. You know, it's -- nobody said -- nobody knows. It's a mess. We shouldn't have gone in there. It was stupid to go in there. And this is why it was stupid.

It's like you want to be a revolutionary? You want to start a war? Ask yourself this question: Am I sincere? If the answer to that question is yes, I'm sincere, I truly believe in this cause, now ask yourself this question: Do I have the will of all the people? Of all the people. If the answer to that is no, it is not your time and if you go to take it, you don't have the thrust behind you to be victorious karmically, you know. And you've ruined it for the guy coming up after you, you know, whose time it might have been. So George in a punky way seized an opportunity for personal glory that was totally inappropriate and unwinnable. So now we're in a mess. Who can get us out? Can Kerry get us out? Well, you know, despite all of this political saluting and everything, you know, which is kind of like the cheap tricks of show business. You kind of have to swallow that and say that works for a lot of people. The same thing with singers: Hit a high note, raise your arm in the air, people go crazy. 99 percent of people go crazy when you do that. Still a cheap trick, it's manipulation. However it's manipulating the vote. Here the vote is important. So I've got to swallow, like, some of my 'phony baloney!' (laughs) when I see these cheap tricks. They just work on a lot of people who aren't hip to them as tricks so, you know, it's a hard call as to whether you -- no, you do need to change horses in midstream I do believe. I think you've just got to get, you know -- before the Constitution is destroyed I think you have to get Bush out of power. That's my -- is the other party any better? Well, he's shown evidence of being good in a crisis. Once he gets out of this political pandering pocket -- it's hard to tell. It's a hard call whether there's greatness in him in spite of his medals, I don't know. But we know that Bush made a terrible mistake and we're all in trouble for it. So can he get us out of this mistake? I don't think so because he doesn't even recognize that he's made a mistake.

AB: Speaking of politics and people and war, in the liner notes for "The Beginning of Survival," you include the letter attributed to Chief Seattle in the mid 1800s. It starts out, quote, "The great chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?," unquote. True indeed.

You've got several songs that sort of deal with this sentiment. "Cool Water" which has Willie Nelson's unmistakable voice on it deals with water politics. It's a very old song. Do you know it from your native Saskatchewan, Canada?

JM: Yeah, well, when I was a kid, you know, I used to play with the boys and we either played war and I was the German and had to die in the first act and lie on the ground. But I had a cap pistol so they let me play or we played Roy Rogers. And the Sons of the Pioneers were -- you know, "Happy Trails to You," those guys. They had among them a really good songwriter who was a Canadian and I've covered a couple of his songs, "Cool Water" being one, which I rewrote a little bit because it was a desert rat, you know, looking for an oasis, and I kind of rewrote a few lines to make it a water issue. But, yeah, those were the songs of my childhood. I loved the Sons of the Pioneers. Classic cowboy music.

AB: From "The Beginning of Survival," let's hear Joni Mitchell's "Cool Water."

(Music up.)

AB: That's "Cool Water" from Joni Mitchell's new album, "The Beginning of Survival."

You have another incredibly beautiful song on this new album called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." And the lyrics are based on a W. B. Yeats poem called "The Second Coming," and I remember this poem from a literature class that I took several years ago and there was a lot of debate about what the lines meant. You have this line in there which he has which is "Some revolution" -- "Surely some revolution is at hand." What kind of revolution is this? What revelation is at hand here?

JM: Well, you know, because it's his poem and not mine -- well, it is partially mine now because you understand the poem was written at a time when blank verse was very fashionable and -- this is my take on it anyway -- and Yeats was a meticulous craftsman. Not only was he really into the sonic sound of words. More than any English-speaking poet I can think of, you know, like so there were many, many points of craft in regard to him. The first stanza I left pretty much intact but to put it in singable form, you had, you know, the opening stanza from which I took my structure and copied it. Then you had almost a journalistic second stanza full of Latin, spiritus mundi, and stuff like that that had to be translated into singable form. And I wrote one verse, "Hoping and hoping as if with my weak faith, the spirit of this world would heal and rise, vast are the shadows that straddle and strafe ..." I'm not even sure what the point of departure in his writing was but, you know, I added a verse -- the estate allowed me to do that. It's an older poem and I think rather than fixing it, you know, with -- I would leave the interpretation up to the individual hearer. I wouldn't attempt to specimenize it and fix the meaning on it.

AB: Now, what our listeners can't see as they listen to this interview is the amazing artwork on this CD. You've done some drawings and paintings on, I believe, all your record covers for years --

JM: Mm-hmm.

AB: I think I have all of your albums and I think you've done the cover for all of them. But it's not something that we hear a great deal about. How do you divide your time between music and painting and life?

JM: Okay. Life, I used to just -- in the beginning I used to run when I had to do press. I really never -- really kind of liked that leg. You know, I liked doing the art but I didn't like -- I wanted the art to -- the people to pay attention to the art but not to me. Well, that's not pop music. All the attention goes to the artist and not much to the art at all. Because it's easier to talk about the psychology or who they're dating or blah, blah, blah, you know, and make all kinds of foolish assumptions. You know, like what your psychology when you wrote this song was. They always get it wrong like if it's a happy song, you wrote it when you were sad. If it's sad you're happy. And everybody's out on a limb trying to assess what your psychological state was. I used to take off during that leg and I quit a few times and withdrew into the bush and I've had a life. I could write -- when I write my memoirs, it will have very little to do with show business. So blessedly I had a life in spite of show business so I had something to write about.

But what was the other part of the question? That's only part that I've answered.

AB: Well, if you can just talk about the process by which you start your paintings. How do you pick your subjects and how do you go about depicting yourself on them?

JM: Oh, okay. Well, first of all, this album has a medicine wheel as a disc and then it's surrounded on both sides by Chief Seattle's, you know, love of the northwest, that's where, you know, he was located. I have a summer home in British Columbia. It's the same landscape and it -- it's a rain forest but between clear cutting and fossil fuel and other -- acid rain and so on there's been a drought for 15 years in the rain forest. So the paintings on this album looks like autumn but it's dying knick-knick, Indian tobacco, you know, in its death throes. It's dying pitch pines, the pines that the Natives used to glue their canoes. Those have a disease in them and so there's, you know, I included it because we have a president who is in complete denial about global warming and ecological damage, and I can think of a couple of incidents in his time in power. What he's doing is giving carte blanche contracts to people with no -- he's giving them in a way that if they do damage to the people working on these projects or the ecology that there's no repercussions. That he's -- for example, it's either Utah or Nevada there's a mountain being mined out, you know, and the contracting company -- I may have heard this on your show. Do you remember this broadcast?

AB: Yes.

JM: Where the miners were saying, you know, they all had silica, lung infections and were dying and wanted to meet the man who did this to them, but the contract was worded in such a way that these people are exempt from any responsibility. Now, that's a stupid thing to do anyway. There's no smart thing to do with nuclear waste. We should not be using it. Are you going to pour it down the mountain where it leaks into the water table or blows like it has in Russia? There's one mountain that they stored nuclear waste in and it blew five cities off the map. You know, like quite a while ago. But the old maps show that there were settlements there and the new maps show nothing. So, you know, from a woman's point of view, you know, nuclear anything is a bad idea because of the waste it creates and there's no place to put it that's good. It's too small a planet.

AB: Now, you've never had qualms dealing with gender and sexual politics in your music. "The Magdalene Laundries," I think, is a perfect example of this. What are "The Magdalene Laundries" and what compelled you to write such a song?

JM: Well, my caretaker in Canada is a German-Dane and he said to me, he sucked on his pipe and he said, "You know, Joni, you're a basically cheerful person but you write these melancholy songs. You write too much at night; you should write more in the daylight." So I went out on the point, it's the same point that's behind me in the cover photograph. And I sat there with my guitar and I came up with the melody for "The Magdalene Laundries" which really sounds like the view there. I mean it's really tuned in to the way the water is and the sky is and everything and it's not a sad melody. It's really -- it's modal but it's not sad. It's beautifully balanced between sad and happy. You know, emotionally in terms of the chords. Then I went to the supermarket and I bought a newspaper as I was checking out and on the front page there was a story that the Magdalene Laundries had been closed in Dublin in 1972 and a realtor had bought 10 acres and they were plowing it for development and they unearthed over a hundred graves of women marked only Magdalene of the Tears, Magdalene of the Sorrows, Magdalene ... you know, so they were buried without a name. And it gave a little bit of an explanation of the story. You know, I was an unwed mother in the '60s and the institutions were full and couldn't take me at that time, but I had a little bit of experience as to, you know, institutionalized contempt, let's put it that way. So with that little bit of understanding and with a lot of empathy, I stood inside that story and imagined myself incarcerated in that situation and that's how it came about.

AB: Before we go to "The Magdalene Laundries," I want to let our lucky listener sponsors know that Geffen Records has been kind enough to donate 10 free copies of your new album "The Beginning of Survival." We will take the 10 first lucky callers. You have to be a listener sponsor to our station. The number to call is 818-985-5735. That's 818-985-KPFK. We want to thank Elliott Kendall from the Universal Music Group for that. And coming up we're going to hear "The Magdalene Laundries" from "The Beginning of Survival."

(Music up.)

AB: That's "The Magdalene Laundries" from Joni Mitchell's "The Beginning of Survival."

We're almost out of time but I did want to ask you one more question. With all this sense of urgency in the world and the extreme sense of optimism that you have on your new album, I just wanted to ask you what keeps you going every day?

JM: Oh, every day. Well, innocence is renewable. You know, like with wonder and delight which is something that's really overlooked in the American arts, I think. "Northern Exposure," there was one television show that had a lot of wonder and delight and also dealt very well with comparative religions. That to me was a very optimistic show. I loved that show. I have all the episodes of it. Great American art, in my opinion. In my opinionated opinion.

So I guess all I need in a day -- I have three cats and a dog. I enjoy my exchanges with them. They're delightful. I have delightful friends, you know, who are really wonderful company and have been for many, many years. I guess that is my stability because that's kind of where my joy lies.

And painting also. When I'm in the process of painting, I don't have a thought in my head. It's a very deep meditation. I can sit there for 14 hours, forget to eat, sleep, you know, all bodily functions (laughs). It's like, you know, I have an escape for stress in the painting process. And also -- God knows why -- because like I alternate between thinking human beings are just a stupid fungus, you know, like that most resembles yeast which it does, DNA, you know, gathering around the watery edges of things, you know, and really thinking that it's a magnificent creature that's going to lift up and, you know, not necessarily being enlightened which I say is so very, very difficult but at least lift itself out of the hell realm from which it drives here, from the hungry ghost realm which is the second lowest in Tibetan Buddhism psychology, which is 'I want, I want, I want' envy and lust and greed, to the animal realm which is where your rapists come from which is one psychological group above that which is 'Me eat now!' Just grunt, grunt, eat, fuck -- excuse me. Censored! (Laughs.) Sorry. And, you know, basic, simple dumb animal urges -- let's put it in context -- to the level above that which is human -- human, full of human longings and above that is kind of a blissy pleasure level called, you know, the -- well, it's where all blissy things happen but it's not enlightened and it's kind of fool's gold in a certain way and you can't stay there very long because your nervous system won't allow you. But at least that we could become human and empathetic and nondivisional and, you know, start celebrating the beauties of our differences. Rome fell and the debate has always been did it rot from within or was it attacked from without and it was both, you know, like we're rotting from within and we're being attacked from without and it's the wrong time to get divisionalistic.

AB: Joni Mitchell, thank you so much for joining us today.

We've been speaking with Joni Mitchell. Her new album, "The Beginning of Survival" is now available.