Interview- Q107-FM, Toronto

Q107-FM
September 1994

Transcribed from the audio by Lindsay Moon

(Interviewer: Steve Warden)

Q. Well, first of all, Joni, welcome back to Canada. And how does it feel to be back not only in Canada but in Yorkville?

A. Oh, I haven't stepped out into the day much, you know. It's mostly been running off at the mouth (laughs) like four and five interviews a day. Yorkville's changed so much, of course, and it's high fashion now as opposed to hippie colorful slum area that it was when I was here.

Q. And as far as the not venturing out during the day, I understand that you're a nocturnal person?

A. Mm-hmm.

Q. And that you don't really like to -- it's almost kind of a vampire thing. You don't like to go out during the day; is that right?

A. No, it's not that I don't like to. It's just that the way our schedule is that there's no time. I've always been nocturnal even as a kid, and I was forced to wake up and go to school, but I'd fall asleep at my desk. I was born nocturnal. And then my work kind of encouraged it. I do my writing mostly at night. And also in this business you draw down a lot of lunatics on yourself, so I've had a lot of strange people coming over the wall, so to speak. So I've been the night watchwoman for many years, and I tend to feel that the light is safer. I don't know why. Maybe that's irrational, but I don't sleep until it's light. So if you take my West Coast hours, I usually go under about 5 or 6 on the West Coast and then you bring them out here, that's like 8 or 9. So we have to get a very late start on interviews here. And there isn't much time. I get up, I eat, I do my yoga, I eat, and maybe some vocal exercises if I'm going to sing. And then I'm in the harness. Then it's dark and you wind down and the same thing the next day. So I haven't had much time to walk around. I think my legs are atrophying. (Laughs).

Q. Try to get out and get a little bit of exercise.

A. Really.

Q. The nocturnal thing, not to dwell on it, but even as a child you --

A. Mm-hmm.

Q. -- that's just the way you were from the very beginning?

A. Yeah, from infancy. I guess I was born in the middle of the night. My mum said that I was up all night and slept during the day. And then school, well, in Saskatoon the radio stations used to shut down around midnight or 1 locally, and powerful stations from Texas would waft up in and out. So I'd take my radio under the covers and listen to the Hit Parade, which was more progressive. We would get things months and sometimes a year late, and I had a column in high school called Fads and Fashions. I don't remember what I put in it, but I do remember listening to advanced radio like waving in and out in Texas and perhaps that went into my column. I don't know.

Q. So right from that the nocturnal thing sounds like it's had a real profound impact on the way your life and your work has developed I guess?

A. Yeah. Yeah -- well, it's good to come to your peak energy as a musician around midnight or 1, you know. It's good for performing since performances take place generally late at night. I mean club life when I played the clubs, you know, I'd be doing my last set at midnight or so, and then generally you'd go out and unwind as people do after work.

So I think most people in the music business are nocturnal, although Seal now there are so many exhaustion syndromes around. I know he goes to bed fairly early. He's got some kind of viral fatigue. And Victoria, I just saw. Vic was in town last night, and she's got MS, so I think she has to probably go to bed early.

There's some gland in your head that needs darkness at 2:30 in the morning. Mine has never seen darkness and it's, you know, it's suppposed to be very bad for it if there's even a light bulb burning in the room. It just needs to rejuvenate itself, you know. They need to put a bag over you like they put a hood over a canary cage. (Laughs).

Q. I'm glad Victoria Williams got together with you. She came up to see us on Monday --

A. Uh-huh.

Q. -- and she'd heard that you were in town and came up to perform for us and said I really want to see Joni. She's a pretty special girl --

A. Yeah.

Q. -- and a great songwriter.

A. Yeah. I really like Vic's company. She's a sweetie.

Q. From a creative point of view as well, you know, you see things differently at night, obviously. But not only in the obvious sense but also perception and some people feel that they operate best at nighttime as you've alluded to.

Do you think it has an effect on the kinds of work that you come up with, the kinds of songs that you write?

A. Well, the phone stops ringing for one thing. You know, the phone is relentless in the daytime, so you cannot get uninterrupted thought. It's impossible. You know, also like I have people on my payroll, and there are things that need my attention, and, you know, there's a lot of demands in the course of the day. So the night provides an expanse of uninterrupted thinking.

But even in terms of global energy -- I'm trying to think of a way to put this. For a while I went into a system of health called Ayurvedic, and it's east Indian, and it divides the body into three departments: Respiratory, digestive, and elimination. Kafa for respiratory, pita for digestive, and vata for -- and it divides the day in the same way so there's a digestive or pita time. From 11 till 2 in the afternoon, you're supposed to eat your large meal then. The next digestive time comes oddly enough at 10:00 at night. The Spanish have their late meal at 10:00 at night. For a brief period your energy goes into the digestive process again. Then after that you have vata time. I think it runs from 11 until 7:00 in the morning, and it's very conducive to thought. So if you're in an Ayurvedic health program like I was, they want you to fall asleep before 10:00 to guarantee that you don't get caught up in that rush of energy that occurs later that is conducive to thinking. There's a very brief vata period in the morning also.

So, you know, I'm not sure exactly where it falls. But I guess I've been seduced by this long, thought-provoking period all my life. I like to sit and muse, review the day, wait to hear the language rattling around in my head that perhaps could be turned into a poem or a song.

Q. It's good that you chose a line of work that you could actually live like that.

A. (Laughs) Yeah, it is. I guess I had to, really.

Q. Let's talk about the new album and begin with the title. What is the significance of "Turbulent Indigo"?

A. "Turbulent Indigo" is the name of a song on the album, which is a portrait of Van Gogh. I guess it means -- it means a lot of things. It means the spiraling brush strokes, the blue strokes of Van Gogh's skies and backgrounds for one thing. But it also means -- indigo being a shade of blue pigment -- and turbulent, it means the emotional disturbance that artist is generally created from. You have to stir up kind of what the Buddhists would consider insanity. A lot of overlapping thoughts, a mulch of disorder, a disorderly mind to create a potpourri of ideas from which to select to do your art, especially as a poet, I think. You know, poetry is the residue of what Buddhists would call an insane mind.

You have to stir up -- a sane mind being defined by a blank mind with no thoughts in it, that definition of sanity. So you need the disturbance to collect your material. So that's a turbulent kind of indigo. Not that all turbulence -- not that all blue chaos, you know, can cough up creativity. But in the artistic temperament it does.

Q. Is that a normal state of the creative process for you? Does it begin that way usually or is it just in this particular project was that the case?

A. No, I think there are times when, um, when the mind is quite prolific. Like I can give you an example. "Song for Sharon Bell" came from a pocket of particularly turbulent thought, where the mind was jumping all over the place, from Staten Island ferry to an Indian reservation in Canada where the kids learned -- the Indian kids lose their fear of heights by clamoring all over a local bridge, to going to weddings in the town of Maidstone in northern Saskatchewan, to overlooking Central Park where people are figure skating down below, to a church on West 16th Street where people are filing in to go to bingo, to Bleecker and McDougal where a gypsy is sitting on the sidewalk soliciting clients.

You know, when you get into big village scenes like that, the profusion of thought that creates that kind of writing, like Dylan's early writing was tremendously populated. Songs were stimulated by amphetamines, which, you know, really create a lot of turbulent indigo (laughs), turbulent thought and then a blue crash period, right? So, you know, I think a lot of profuse and powerful art has been created by artificial or natural emotional disturbances.

Q. You rely on natural emotional disturbances I take it?

A. I do at this point, but I think every artist experiments with substances, you know, to -- "Alice in Wonderland" was written on opium. You know, if you look at a lot of the masterpieces, most of the Irish writers were boozers. Absinthe. Always elixirs have been used by medicine men and shamans and writers, you know, to create an alternate mentality, to stir up thought.

Q. It seems now that the lie has been put to that myth, though. You know, you hear a lot of people talking about that necessarily artists who lived through the late '60s and early 1970s, a lot of those people have disowned that period in that sense and said, you know, like that drugs and alcohol, it may have fueled a certain thrust in my work, but it wasn't, you know, I wouldn't recommend it, and it's not necessary to create. I mean are you disputing that or acknowledging it?

A. I don't -- I don't agree with all of that. I think that at a certain point the elixirs turn left on you and they don't do you any good, you know. I think it all comes down to moderation. If you make your stimulant your normal consciousness, then it becomes the norm, and it's not going to cough up anything but trouble, you know? But if it's used -- if straight consciousness is your major consciousness and upon rare occasion you use a stimulant to change your consciousness, then it's a very new head and it's like a new city or a new country. It can be adventuresome and produce creativity. But if you do it two days in a row or a week in a row or for the rest of your life, you're screwed. No, it will run your creativity right into the toilet.

I think all those things are a matter of moderation and extreme caution. But I wouldn't -- I think that's a sour grapes or a lie to say that there wasn't, you know, a lot of great literature -- it's just a fact -- was created -- and great art was created by emotional disturbances, created by some potion or another. You can't deny that. That's just the truth. But getting strung out on anything is anti-productive and anti-creative absolutely.

Q. I guess maybe some of those people who have said that eventually did get strung out and so they look back even in the beginning when they were maybe doing it occasionally and it provided a spark, you know, after subsequently becoming hooked on heroin or booze or whatever, then just wanted to dismiss the whole thing.

I remember Eric Clapton telling me that, you know, the only way I look back on that is I played out of tune a lot. I wasn't really there.

A. I don't think heroin ever was a creative drug except for perhaps Charlie Parker, and he didn't recommend it to anybody. He was trying to dissuade everybody that followed in his footsteps and, you know, he was just a genius. People attributed it on the drug, and people thought if they took the drug, they'd be a genius, but it doesn't work that way.

Q. Where does your turbulence come from now?

A. Natural emotions, things sticking in your craw, something stupid somebody said, you know, something bright somebody said.

Q. Anything specific that you could mention in the context of this album?

A. Well, a lot of the pictures and images have been collected for a long time and stored like film ready to be collaged into something.

I'll give you an example. In "Borderlines" there's a line that says, let's see, "every stone thrown through glass/every mean streets kick ass/every swan caught on the grass will draw a borderline."

Years ago I was in upstate New York in the Hamptons with a couple of friends of mine, and we saw some cars had pulled over to the side of the road where there was a tidal marsh and they were looking at something. So we pulled over to see what it was. And what it was was a swan with her babies -- what are they called, lornets? -- had gotten stranded on the grass, and there was a brutish fellow who had pulled over. I swear to God this is the guy, you know, that singes cats' ears and he really had a brute mentality. You could feel that if we weren't there that, you know, he'd probably break the bird's neck. It was a strong violence coming off of him.

And he was teasing the bird, and the bird was backing up trying to get her babies towards the water because they were very awkward the lot of them on the land. And as a defense she would pick up sticks with her bill and real emphatically like lift her head high up in the air for emphasis and drop them on the ground, and it was, "here's my line, don't cross it." And she'd look over her shoulder, back up, and the babies would back up, and she kept doing that gesture.

And this brute was laughing like, you know, at this futile defense, you know, and I always thought, God, you know, I wonder if in the rest of nature if this little borderline, this little defense line, would be honored in the way when the possum goes belly-up it's honored, or when the wolf goes belly-up, you know, there are submission postures that will make the animal world walk away. But it doesn't work on man, you know? There are images like that that you could say that that was a poignant and emotionally disturbing thing to witness to me. But it was stored for a long time until there was a place to parquet it.

So, yeah, you know, you walk around seeing, thinking, feeling, sensing, and collecting thought, collecting pictures and ideas. They aren't all born at the same time, you know. There can be a longer gestation period before one of those pieces of information appears in a work of art.

Q. And how do you know when it's time for it to be, you know, given some sort of musical form?

A. That's a different thing. The music, I just sit down late at night and put my guitar in a tuning or get lost, twiddle the strings and get lost until I find a new tuning. I have 50 original tunings, which creates some fresh harmonic movement in the context of the history of music. It's outside pretty much any idiom, some of this chordal movement. Kind of like jazz but it doesn't fit into the harmonic rules of jazz either.

So by changing -- by changing the way the neck of the guitar normally is played, you put yourself in a position of exploration and you have to reinvent your fingering every time for each of these tunings on the left hand. So you have to find the chords, so there's an adventure to that and a puzzle-solving that's exciting.

Then when you find the chords that are there, you arrange them into emotional patterns. When those emotional patterns, the architecture, the structure, the foundation of the song is laid, then you look at the overall mood, which has moods within it. It will have plateaus which will hold long descriptive passages, and it will have pressure points where the chords change in a way that they shift you emotionally. They'll either shift you emotionally up or emotionally down, they'll shift you into inquiry, or they'll shift you into doubt, or they'll shift you into wonder, or, you know, so that you kind of know the tone of the statement before you begin to write that has to go there.

Now you have to find some kind of a story from what happened to you that week or what happened to you in your life or someone else's story. Perhaps it comes from a newspaper or from the telling of a friend, well, this happened to me today or this happened to my roommate, or this happened to my mother, you know.

So you just have to keep your eyes and ears open and wait.

Q. And wait. And how do you -- in the example that you gave a couple of minutes ago about the swans or the ducks --

A. Swans.

Q. Swans. How do you know that that particular thing, that particular idea or memory, fits with what you're doing musically? I mean do you make that connection? Is it --

A. That's your craft, that's your artistic judgment. You know, you say, oh, this fits perfectly here, you know, in my creative opinions, you know. You're looking for something to chink that hole, and suddenly your file coughs up this bit of film that has been stored, and you say, yes, that's the perfect image to go there.

Q. But that's a completely mental thing. I mean, you don't sit down with, you know, with things spread in front of you in terms of lyrical ideas and stories? It's all just in your head?

A. It's all in your head until you begin to write it down. You begin to write it down and there are maybe holes in the passages particularly the way I write. I don't write in iambic pentameter. I parquet to the music which coughs up a different kind of rhyme scheme. I also I think pay more attention to the marriage of harmony and lyric content than most people do as a point of craft.

And I also want the words melodically to have the correct inflection of English, so that you're not bending, making three syllables out of a one-syllable word as frequently as others might. You're looking -- if you have a (sings) "oh-oh-oh" a melody that breaks like that, you're not looking for (sings) "lo-o-ove." You're looking for (sings) "down the road" (laughs) so that it marries better.

Q. I follow you. I mean I guess in a lot of cases a lot of artists are lazy when it comes to that sort of thing and will maybe go the easy route, and it sounds to me -- it sounds, you know, to somebody who has no musical talent at all like me that it would be a very laborious process. Is it --

A. Huh-uh.

Q. Does it take a long time?

A. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the puzzles are stubborn. And sometimes too the melody will cough up really hard restrictions, and that's happened to me a couple of times.

"Two Grey Rooms" on the last album, for instance, was a jam. It was one take with a live jam, and I threw on a sketch melody. I hadn't even thought of the melody. All I had was my chordal movement and instrumental piano piece and we jammed it up. So the melody that went onto tape was the birth of the melody. I very seldom capture that on tape. Usually by the time I come to tape, I've sung a wordless melody many, many times to the guitar part or the piano part. But in this case it was its birth and it came out like with vowels that were more common to French than English (sounds out) "long-dong," just the way -- well, I got attached to that and trying to find sonically the English that had those kind of vowels was difficult. And I thought at one point I'm going to have to write this in French, and my French isn't that good. That one took six or seven years. We recorded it for "Wild Things" and it came out on the last album.

I finally found a story about a homosexual love story from a fellow from Fassbinder's crowd in Germany, a story of obsession, and when I read the story I think in Interview Magazine, I didn't think of it as making a song out of it, but it was a kind of a haunting story of obsession. And one day I was at the piano and singing this song again, and I suddenly realized that the modality, the romanticism of this melody and the romanticism, the overt romanticism of this unrequited love story were quite suitable to one another and I managed sonically to find -- to tell the story with the correct vowels and consonants.

But I make the puzzles very hard for myself because I enjoy them that way, you know, harder than most people would care to do, that's true.

Q. You mentioned a couple minutes ago about having 50 different guitar tunings, and that's something that through the years, you know, you've become known for, and so many other musicians have acknowledged your work and been influenced by it.

Can you talk a little bit about that and how you've developed those sorts of things? I mean do they just come naturally? Do you work at them?

A. The tunings?

Q. Yeah.

A. Well, let's start at the beginning. I wrote my first song, "Urge for Going," in standard tuning. Then I set out to try and write some more songs, but I found -- I had polio so my left hand isn't as facile as my right hand, and the harmonic sense that I had innately, the chords that I heard in my head, were quite complex, and I didn't have the dexterity with my left hand to reach for them.

So Eric Anderson showed me Open G tuning which was a tuning that came up from the Black blues culture. Open G, Open C, I think, Open E, D Modal. Those were the tunings that were known and kicking around the coffeehouses. I think Keith Richards plays mostly in Open G. It's a fairly versatile tuning, and I think most of his compositions are in that modality.

Then I began to experiment to tune the guitar to open chords that I heard in my head. They were broader, more like jazz chords but not -- jazz harmony has its rules too. Although it sounds extremely free, there are books written on it, and it does have limitations, and some of this harmony is outside the limitations of that idiom.

The more I got into searching through these tunings, the more thrilling it was for me because it coughed up very, very fresh harmony, unusual, things I never heard before, even in classical music. Classical music, a lot of it, seems very mathematical to me, and I can hear the buggy wheels turning in it, and it's almost like scales. There's a logic to it emotionally that seems more intellectual, not always, but it seems like an intellectual exercise as opposed to, you know, an emotional depiction of how you feel.

So I just kept going with them. And then I'd lose tunings. I'd be looking for one of them and I wouldn't get it quite right. There would be two strings that would be almost right, and I'd realize, well, this is a good tuning too. So then I'd search it for the chords within it. So over time I developed this open tuning, and because the strings are so slack, generally you have an E on the top and an E on the bottom in standard tuning. That's how it's tuned. I've got C on the bottom, which is pretty slack, and even B Flat where it's almost atonal. That string is really flapping. So my left hand, although it looks simple, a lot of bars and simple fingering, there's a lot of comping and pressure realse and stopping the string from splaying out too wide so that it goes (sound) although sometimes I'll let it go like that. Like on the song "The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey," where I turn the bottom string into a snare drum almost, just let it go slack and slap around.

Then my right hand developed a slapping pattern from playing the dulcimer. When I got my first dulcimer, because it sits on your knee, I tended to beat on it like a bongo drum, and so the slapping pattern developed that then crept into my guitar playing. So now in a way when I play, I think of myself as a drummer, a bass player, and a small horn section. The music is very orchestral. The top three strings are like the piccolo-flute on the top, muted trumpet on the second string and third string, you know, viola like on the fourth, and I'm down into the celli register on the bottom. So the thumb is the bass player and the slaps are putting in -- not your 'backbeat you can't lose it' necessarily. I play a backbeat or an upbeat but a lot of times they're shaved, almost like Latin accents, they're shaved 16th notes or -- people have told me what I do. It's more instinctive than intellectual.

Q. Right. Have you noticed that you have influenced a lot of guitar players over the years? Have you heard some of the ideas that you've explored come out in other forms?

A. I'm told that I've influenced guitar players. I don't hear anybody that plays guitar like me. It's very eccentric, the way I play. I hear my harmony. Prince had an album one time and there was a harmonic passage. It was a playback party that he had for it. I forget which one it was. And there was a harmonic passage that I really liked. It was orchestrated different than I would, and I said, "Oh, I really like that harmony. Where is that coming from?" "From you," he said. (Laughs.) To tell you the truth, I didn't really recognize it. I had to kind of analyze it to see where it was coming from.

There are a lot of women that are compared to me, but harmonically, lyrically, rhythmically, their style of playing guitar bears no resemblance to me. The only thing that bears resemblance really is that they're women that play guitar. I think that's born of kind of ignorance and laziness and it's unfair to all of us. We all have our unique way of expressing ourselves.

Q. Just a couple of final points, okay? You know, it seems that you have been able to maintain a certain dignity in your career that a lot of your contemporaries have not. Have you consciously avoided becoming --

A. A sexpot? (Laughs.)

Q. Well, you couldn't do much about that, Joni, that's a fait accompli.

A. Well, they tried to make a sexpot out of me because at first I was not sexually exploitive, you know. I was a fine artist in the pop aren

A. The first ads on Warner Brothers, the first one was "Joni Mitchell is 90 percent Virgin," you know. They had a problem with my innocence, you know, the Brooklyn boys. And the second ad campaign which I was showed yesterday was, "Joni Comes Across" -- no, "Joni Finally Comes Across."

So, you know, the traditional role of the female is like, you know, is quite burlesque, and this was not, you know, (in a British haughty accent) I'm a serious composer (laughs).

Q. Well, I wasn't actually going to bring up sex.

A. No, what were you going to bring up?

Q. What I was going to say was you've avoided becoming a nostalgia act --

A. Uh-huh.

Q. -- in the way that so many of your contemporaries have. How do you explain that?

A. Well, I just -- I just couldn't -- I'm always more excited about what I've done recently. I think my latest work is more suitable dramatically. I like presenting my new songs. So I had to train my audience in a way not to make a human jukebox out of me, even though they'd be calling out the names of songs that they loved and they had their life woven into. And, you know, I just educated them just say look, you know, build some new memories against these new songs, you know. Don't live in the past. Because people tend to do that. They listen to a lot of music in their youth, then later on they don't listen to it much. They don't seem to build memories like they did when they were young, and that's not a full life. They should keep going and, you know, I'm hoping to write wonderful middle-aged songs. You know, there haven't been that many of them written, and it's a youth-oriented culture.

I've been thinking about something Faye Dunaway said years back recently. It was at a time when actresses were complaining that there were no good roles for women and there weren't. All the roles were written by women and they were basically decorative parts and tits and ass and, you know, she said to me, "Joni, you're lucky because can you create your own roles."

And I hadn't thought of it really that way, you know, I hadn't focused on it as a role. You know, I just thought they were songs. But really she's true, they're little plays, and I'm the playwright and I am the actress and I've written some songs really that -- like "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" that I didn't have the right voice for, I don't think, although maybe it's interesting the way it was. But I think that would be a good song for a man with more grit in his voice to sing, to bring out the darkness of it, the soliloquy.

I just like to keep going forward. I'm not dried up. I haven't hit a writer's block. Many of my contemporaries can no longer write, and so, you know, they -- they're on the road playing their old songs. But that would be hell for me. I couldn't do it.

Q. And obviously something that you don't have to do.

A. Well, I mean some of the old songs, a lot of the old songs, they're not disposable songs, you know. There are a lot of them -- there are some that I think are ingenue roles, but even ones that I think are ingenue roles like "Circle Game" which I think is a very young song. I sang that at the Edmonton Folk Fest and I take that back so I could work up a lot of the old material and I am doing that and scattering it in with the new material. I've laid it to rest so long that it's fresh for me, and I'm actually bringing new experience to it so it has a new vitality.

When I can -- as long as I can genuinely get into it and find something as an actress, so to speak, you know because they are very theatrical, these songs, to bring to the role, I have no problem with playing the old songs. But just to go through -- I don't want to as Miles would say (in a husky whisper) I don't want to do that duty shit (laughs).

Q. Fair enough. You would seem like a pretty logical person to ask, even though you may not have any opinion of it at all, what you thought of the whole idea of Woodstock '94?

A. Well, you can't create an event -- or recreate an event like that. I thought it would be kind of a strange parody. And it was very commercialized and I didn't really watch it on TV, so I'm not in a good position to -- to talk about it too much really. But I declined appearing there. I thought, no, you can't recreate this historical and political phenomenon almost. It would just -- it would just be kind of a costume party, you know. It's something that happened once and won't happen again.

Q. What do you remember about creating that particular song, "Woodstock"?

A. I just remember feeling like the girl, you know, like the girl that couldn't go. You know, the boys were allowed -- CSN and I went to the airport, and we were told that it was a disaster area there and that we couldn't get in and get out. I had to do a television show the following day. Management deemed that it would be too risky to get me in, might not be able to get me out. So I went back into Manhattan and the boys rented a helicopter and got in and showed up at my TV show the next day. So we could have got me in and out, but if that had happened, I probably wouldn't have had the sufficient turbulent indigo to write the song (laughs).

Q. Good way to put it. And one last point, will you tour?

A. Perhaps. Maybe. It's difficult -- you know, I'm not an arena artist. I don't suit that format. I'm a small hall artist, and the small halls are very expensive, and even -- I can't work for free any more. We artists are looked -- everything we do is looked upon as self-promotion, and I couldn't go out on a tour. I have post-polio syndrome, which is very like MS. It's almost the same thing. So I have to conserve my energy.

The question is where is my energy best spent? Should I -- should I put it towards making the next five albums that I'm committed to? In which case, how do I promote them? You know, it's difficult for an artist of my age and my vitality. There's a paradox there. You know, I'm -- my work is still fresh. I insist upon it being fresh at the time that it isn't fresh. I'm as keen as I was when I was a kid. Nothing has changed, you know. As long as that continues, I should be able to make albums for the next six years.

But touring is stressful on a body that has wiring damage, so to speak, and there's no remuneration. You know, you're the last to be paid. The artist pays for everybody. And if we can figure out a way maybe by sponsorship or -- you don't want to raise the tickets so that I can have a salary too. Everyone that's out with me would be paid. We have to figure out a way.

Q. One last quick point: How much do you keep up with contemporary Canadian music, and if so, if you do at all, what do you think?

A. I don't have a radio in my truck, and I don't listen that much to music except source music. Music is everywhere, so if I'm walking around in the streets here and music is coming out of a building, I hear it. For instance, Piaf and Aznavour has been the sound of the restaurant next door, and that was wonderful.

I like good music. I like great music. You know, I don't keep up with the new, new, newness of it all because I don't think that newness necessarily means greatness. Usually it doesn't. There's a lot of interest in newness for newness's sake, but there isn't -- there isn't a lot of greatness being developed. A lot of it seems to be second and third generation of a good ide

A. This is not a particularly melodic period, and I'm a melody lover. I hear some -- if anybody has anything interesting that they would like to hip me to, you can send it to my management (laughs).

Q. Okay. Joni, thanks very much. Good luck with "Turbulent Indigo," and it was a pleasure talking to you.

A. Thank you very much.