She says she’s happier than ever, but Joni Mitchell’s new ‘Turbulent Indigo’ album can’t conceal the bitterness of the long-distance singer

As far as most people are concerned, her peak creative period ended 20 years ago. Joni Mitchell realizes this - and has plenty of theories about why that perception took hold - but she can’t understand why people talk about her in the past tense. It’s not as if she ever dropped out or stopped making music and painting.

"I’ve never felt better in my life," says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter, settling into her Manhattan hotel room to talk about her new album, "Turbulent Indigo" (Reprise), which will be released Tuesday. "I’m happy with my life and have love in my life. Things are good."

But for someone who feels so essentially upbeat about the way things are going, Joni Mitchell sure does haul a lot of baggage around. Critics occupy a special place on her enemies list, which includes record company honchos, former friends and colleagues (and lovers) on the Southern California music scene, doctors and lawyers (of course), service people who overcharge her because she’s famous and lives in an oversized house.

The house is in Los Angeles, a town she hates even though she has lots of friends there because, "Driving in traffic is difficult, extreme. Your fellow civilians are hostile. The shopping center is full of Russians who, like, try to beat you if you don’t watch your bill, they’re all like black market immigrants or something. The restaurants that I eat in are close enough to Brentwood, but there’s an influx of, like, you know, sickly tourists wanting to know where the woman shops and how to copy her. You’re glad to get through the day without a fire or a mudslide or a drive-by shooting. You jump in traffic when a car backfires. Lovely place to live. Full of inspiration."

When she pauses for a breath, it’s to pull on a cigarette; she’s chain smoking.

Mitchell may have projected the image of the ice queen diva - she’s so Scandinavian-looking, her lyrics drip with sophistication, her music is burnished with such cool surfaces, she’s so arty - but it turns out that’s not her style at all. Throw her a topic, and she’s off and running, with anecdotes that grow into short stories peopled with the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Marlene Dietrich, art-history references, giggly self-deprecating asides, revisionary parenthetical remarks that spin out and come to rest - temporarily - about a half mile down the road.

So, it turns out the artiste is a yakker. That comes as a refreshing departure from the pro forma celebrity interview, but also makes you wish you’d brought along some chill pills; Mitchell’s reflections have a breathless, anxious quality, and her speech is seasoned with bitterness. She hears it herself and worries about how it will sound. But her instinct is to let it all hang out, and her mind is so active. Maybe even hyperactive. She’s a world class auteur trying to make a comeback after a couple of decades in the commercial wilderness, but what she’d really like to be doing is painting. Sculpting. Writing.

"I have ideas for several books," says Mitchell, "but no time to do it. I have a lot of ideas for painting, but no time to do it. I am here with my guitar on the road for the possibility of - I have insomnia, you know, which isn’t really insomnia but I’m trained to go to bed at 7 in the morning, which is 10 o’clock on the East Coast. I’m nocturnal, and after midnight the phones stop ringing and I contemplate, whatever."

"If you locked me in solitary from this day on," she says, "I still wouldn’t get everything done that I have in mind to do. I get too many ideas."

As the composer of "Woodstock," Mitchell’s name surfaced prominently in the context of the 25th anniversary festival. But it would fall to the Spin Doctors and Crosby, Stills and Nash to play her anthem, because she wasn’t interested; she declined an invitation to appear. To her, the first festival - which she didn’t attend either - was a "turning point, it was basically the pinnacle of hippie culture." Afterward, with the hippies’ acceptance came the "commercialization and exploitation. The drugs got harder, and everything fell apart."

The anniversary festival "just seemed silly" and besides, Mitchell resents being pigeonholed as a ‘60s artist. "I don’t see myself as belonging to an era. I belong to three new decades of music now, as far as I’m concerned."

But as far as the mass pop audience is concerned, Mitchell belongs to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was 20 years ago that she released "Miles of Aisles," the live album that recapitulated the material from the first six albums that established her as a singular artist and superstar; it’s on the strength of the accomplishments of this early period that she has been nominated for induction to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame this year.

Starting with "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" in 1975, Mitchell became increasingly experimental and gradually lost touch with the audience that takes its cues from commercial radio stations. Her 1979 collaboration with the dying Charles Mingus represented a divorce from the pop mainstream, a rift that has never been reconciled. She has released a new album every couple, three years since then, writing songs with recognizable verses and choruses, and some of them have received good notices. But her bottom-line critical reputation is that she went out for a walk in the mid-’70s and never came back.

"People are sheep, and the press does manipulate them," says Mitchell. Even Mozart fell out of favor, she says, and when that happens, "you can’t do anything about it, but you’re still creative, so what are you going to do, give up and roll over? No. You’re going to experiment. It’s an opportunity to experiment."

On one new song, "Borderline," Mitchell fires a few shots across the critics’ bow: "You snipe so steady/ You snub so snide/So ripe and ready to diminish and deride!" The lyric was prompted by a negative review of a show of her paintings. Her identification with the misunderstood artist is so complete that the title cut of the album is about Vincent Van Gogh, and the cover art is bleak self-portrait, complete with bandaged ear, she did in his style.

Mitchell feels she’s also been victimized by audience fragmentation. There are fewer outlets for music like hers, and as marketing increasingly targets a young male audience perceived as the most active listenership, Mitchell gradually has lost the primary requisite of appealing to that audience: her youth. She talks about the exploitation of the "teenage wet dream ideal."

"So much concern is put on youth in terms of pop, it has nothing to do with the music," she says. "And there’s a very strong male attitude about how long a woman is attractive. I’ve run into men who say women are over the hill at 27. My father thinks they’re over the hill at 36."

When Mitchell was 36, she talked to journalist Cameron Crowe of her concerns abut "aging gracefully." Turning 51 in a couple of weeks, she now says, "It’s not as bad as I thought. As a matter of fact, it’s much better."

The single "How Do You Stop" takes aging head on: "One day you’re too young/Then you’re in you prime/Then you’re looking back/At the hands of time." The song, co-written by the late Dan Hartman, is about neglecting to cultivate love in the hurly-burly of living. On this count, Mitchell considers herself to be fortunate; she’s happily married to Larry Klein, her bassist and producer, who happens to be 13 years her junior.

Mitchell says she adopted the tune because, "There aren’t a lot of good middle-aged songs. I hope to write some for the next album. I have one already called ‘Happiness Is the Best Face Lift.’ Why should I attempt to play ingenue roles? Middle age, adapting, that’s what I will attempt to do."

One major recent adaptation is her record contract: After a 25-year association with David Geffen, her new album is on a Warner Bros. label. Mitchell says that although her albums haven’t made enough to recoup their costs, Geffen didn’t want to lose her. "But at the same time he didn’t want to treat me fairly, so I had to leave."

Mitchell says Geffen called long-time Warners chief Mo Ostin and tried to discourage him from signing her by saying, "What do you want with that 50-year-old folksinger?"

"You know," says Mitchell, "that’s as concise a way of devaluing me as he possible could. The slight was ineffective, it was a joke really. But it was there."

Geffen says that’s not the way it happened at all. "I’m the person who called Mo and suggested he sign Joni," says the entertainment mogul. "She wanted to make a change because her records aren’t selling, and she thought maybe somebody new could bring new enthusiasm to it."

Mitchell has confidence that if her music gains exposure, it will connect - "Young audiences are not as apartheid as the market seems to think" - and Warner Bros. sees the emergent Adult Album Alternative radio format as a ripe opportunity for her.

It also can’t hurt that we’re in a season of Women in Rock pieces, and Mitchell’s name always comes up in those, reverently. In a recent Rolling Stone article, Chrissie Hynde, Me’Shell NdegeOcello and Tori Amos paid particular respect to her original style of guitar playing, an often overlooked aspect of Mitchell’s art. Over the years, she’s been the standard against whom new female singer-songwriters are compared, and artists like Prince and Seal (who will appear in her new video) have gone out of their way to cite her as an inspiration.

Naturally she’s gratified by the current wave of appreciation. "It makes me feel better. Because, I’ve pretty much been dismissed, but my fans have been loyal." Still, she regrets that "so many people have to be told it’s hip to like me," and there’s a down-side to being the prototype.

"I can’t reinvent my name. So, to get the freshness in the market, what they do is they [give] my name to young women with a guitar and call them ‘the new Joni Mitchell.’ So in this manner, you know, they exploit the young girl like a soap."

Mitchell says, "I’m not a feminist. It’s to my interest and to our interests that men be liberated simultaneously." But the battle of the sexes gets full play on "Turbulent Indigo"; there’s even a song called "Sex Kills." Because, early in her career, she wrote achingly personal songs that dealt with the search for free love - and reportedly had relationships with various big-name male contemporaries - Mitchell developed a reputation as the ultimate liberated Hippie Chick, a reputation she’s been trying to live down since.

"I’ve never made a display of my sexuality," she argues. She acknowledges she briefly "shard the optimism that we had a chance to try and find a non-possessive way of loving one another. That was the ideal, but the ideal was not what was going on. It was very sexually exploitative."

Rolling Stone once published a graphic of Mitchell and all of her supposed Southern California rock and roll lovers. "They finally made an example of me," she says, "and showed arrows leading out of me, all the men that I supposed screwed. You know, called me the Old Lady of the Year. My own generation did that."

"The assumptions that were made as to who I was [sleeping with], all of them were pretty ridiculous. They were assuming that I wrote this song about so-and-so, and they were wrong, you know, it was false assumptions."

Mitchell sidesteps a question of whether "Not to Blame" - about a celebrity who has beaten up his girlfriend and driven a wife to suicide - is about Jackson Browne. "See, that’s another assumption. The song is about battered women."

Asked for her opinion on how her other early peers have aged, she fondly recalls playing a concert with Dylan recently but insists that "musically, I didn’t take any inspiration from that era of contemporary pop." But, she allows, "I enjoyed certain evenings of Crosby, Stills and Nash" and expresses particular admiration for Nash. "I think part of the essence of aging gracefully is keeping your inner child alive, that’s the creative part of you. And your enthusiasm. And Graham, yeah, he’s very enthused."

Mitchell has spoken in the past of making music until she’s 80, but now she’s not so sure that’s possible. "I’d like to keep going. But this contract that I’ve signed gives the record company hundreds of ways to get rid of me. It’s a bean-counting business now; the people at the top are covering the losses of their other conglomerates."

"They’re just going to look at me like a statistic, they’re not music lovers. If people support me by not taping and by giving the bean counters some numbers to work with, then I will stay in the business. If not, they’ll drop me, no matter how talented I am. No matter how unfinished."

Touring would enhance her commercial viability, but she finds the road too strenuous. Her nervous and muscular systems, she says are deteriorating, residual effects of childhood polio. Doctors, apparently, haven’t been much help. "Oh and look who comes to council my deep distress, the pompous physicians. Oh, what carelessness!" That’s from "The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)," the finale of "Turbulent Indigo". In the song, Job rails at God, "Let me speak, let me spit out my bitterness." Mitchell says the song represents her editing of Job’s story "with empathy".

"You know," she says, "I’ve been to the bottom. I think the bottom. I’ve been to some bottoms. I think everybody does in a rich, full life. So from the bottom, you can certainly empathize with a man who has had everything taken away.

"I had a lot of grief, and much was taken from me in terms of health and money in the ‘80s. I was robbed by everyone who could get their hands on my money. They took some. It became fashionable in the ‘80s. And I had a lot of illness and a lot of bad doctors. You know, so I had that experience. I had enough experience to tackle Job."