Hard-hitting new album 'Turbulent Indigo' recalls Joni Mitchell's 70's heyday

She seems barely touched by time: the blunt long hair, mile-high cheekbones and luminous blue eyes still hold.

As she approaches 51, Joni Mitchell finds only the faintest lines creasing an image that dates from the '70s, her last era as a cultural icon. Back then, the Canadian-born artist established herself as the master of singer-songwriters, raising a genre of gentle introspection to brutal art.

Such antique images can't help but intrude on an interview held to promote Mitchell's brand-new album - her first for Warner Bros. since her classic 1971 work, "Blue". (She spent the intervening years on David Geffen's label.) "Turbulent Indigo" recalls Mitchell's masterpiece not only in its label and title, but in its spare arrangements and inescapable melodies.

But don't call it a comeback. Sitting in her Manhattan hotel room for a rare interview, Mitchell insists her muse never left her.

"My work really hasn't been appreciated since my sixth album" - 1974's "Court and Spark", she says, lighting another of her ever-present cigarettes. "This is my 17th album. I've done a lot of good work in between."

True, but little as compellingly enraged as "Turbulent Indigo". At one point, Mitchell sings: "Let me speak/let me pour out my bitterness," which she goes on to do in track after track, spitting bile at the church, doctors, lawyers, fame, the media and more. While her last album, 1992's "Night Ride Home", turned inward, the new one addresses the world.

That's odd, considering the sea change in Mitchell's personal life over the last two years. She split from her husband and producer of more than 10 years, Larry Klein, the day before recording began. They managed to cut the record together anyway. "It wouldn't affect our art, but it did affect how we felt toward one another," she says. "There was tension".

Mitchell says she instigated the breakup. "I was bullying him out of the nest. Since I married him so young [he was 25, she 39], Klein spent a third of his life with me. He needed to get out into the world."

If that sounds suspiciously benevolent, Mitchell won't elaborate on her own problems with the relationship. She admits only frustration over issues she couldn't control. "For him, the 'Mr. Mitchell' aspect of things came into play," she says.

Regardless, Mitchell calls the breakup "rational and reasonable". And, she explains, "because the disillusion of my marriage was relatively graceful and didn't cough up any violent hurt, it didn't become a topic for the writing."

Instead, Mitchell fixed her cross hairs on issues like spousal abuse. In an already notorious track, "Not to blame," Mitchell details an abuse story that does everything but mention by name fellow L.A. songwriter Jackson Browne (who allegedly beat Daryl Hannah two years ago). Mitchell plants clues in the song about Hannah, Browne's famed charity work and, most shockingly, the 1976 suicide of his wife Phyllis.

Still, Mitchell won't cop to writing the song about her colleague. "Let's not hang it on one guy," she insists. "It's so much broader than that."

She's more forthcoming, however, when discussing an even more charged subject - mortality. In the song "The Sire of Sorrow", Mitchell rails at God for her lot, damning life itself. "Better I should have been taken directly from the cradle to the grave," goes one of the zippier lines.

"I've spent my time in the ash pit," says the songwriter. "I felt I was ready to take on a classic theme."

Mitchell's medical problems the last few years gave her the raw material - and left her with no love for doctors. "My ovaries abscessed in the late 70s," she recounts. "In the early 80s, I was given five years to live. I was administered an experimental medicine that was not properly monitored. It created a bleeding lesion on my larynx, which they tried to blame on my smoking."

She says she's better now, but during her illness, Mitchell's troubles were compounded by a tax dispute in California. "They tried to rob me. I got an abnormal taste of the greed of the '80s, the permission to steal."

Her anger yielded the politically accusatory album "Dog Eat Dog" in 1985. Like all her '80s work, the album found neither commercial nor critical approval. Yet Mitchell places no blame on her work. "I was out of synch with the times," is her assessment.

She does, however, blame Geffen Records for not promoting her. "David [Geffen] thinks a record rises in and of itself. It didn't cost David anything to have me over there. I never saw a record royalty. Basically, what he offered me was slavery with tenure. He'd never drop me, and he would probably give me private loans because it would make him feel like a benefactor. I said to him, 'Why is it so easy for you to be generous and so hard for you to be fair?'"

Geffen begs to differ. "Even though we lost money on every one of her records, we always treated Joni as one of the most important artists in the world," says the mogul.

Mitchell says she spent a year in litigation to leave the label. "I beat City Hall," she beams.

These days, Mitchell's frustration with the business surrounds its emphasis on youth. Still, that won't stop Mitchell's ambition. She enthuses about new synthetic orchestrations for her guitar, about finding fresh ways to integrate classical music and African rhythms.

Won't such steps invite more criticism of her ambition, as it did with her 1979 jazz LP, "Mingus"?

"So what?" Mitchell retorts, triumphant in anger. "To follow an idea through - in the end, that's what counts."