It's probably a little late in the game to comment on Joni Mitchell, but maybe the distance between now and Mitchell's recent splash across the front pages is a healthy one.

Besides, it hasn't been so long anyone should need reminding Mitchell and the daughter she gave up for adoption over 30 years ago were reunited this spring. I didn't read much about it, but I read enough to know that after the initial excitement, most people wished everyone would shut up about it. Some, like The Sun's Liz Braun, took it a step further and savaged Mitchell for going so public with the whole tawdry mess. Now that I read.

Nonetheless, the whole bittersweet tale, coupled with a profile of Mitchell in the June issue of Vanity Fair, piqued my interest in the Canadian singer. I bought two of her recordings and gave them to my wife for her birthday, partly just so I could have them. This is how things work when you live together.

The first, 1974's Court And Spark, was so shockingly familiar I got all choked up as soon as I heard the first few notes from the title track. My other purchase was Turbulent Indigo, Mitchell's Grammy winner from a couple of years back (but don't let that discourage you).

I've been playing the CDs to death ever since and really resented having to wrap them up as presents.

The most touching thing I find about Mitchell is the clues in her songs sent out to the child she gave up. They seem such a hopeless way of somehow bringing the two of them together. What were the chances her daughter would hear those songs and then think that surely this was her birth mother? I know there are people out there who think Mitchell is a bit of a shark, but it struck me as heartbreakingly naive.

It also hit a little too close to home. I don't have any children wandering around the planet -- I don't have children, period -- but I leave clues about my personal life in my paintings and stupidly hope the right people will get the message. This is the nature of truth in art. You often never see it until you're told about it.

Mitchell has come a long way from Court And Spark to Turbulent Indigo. The happy lover from 1974 had grown increasingly desperate by 1995 and now, it seems, we know why.  

I won't bother with some of her lines because, without the music, they lose too much of their impact. Let's just say that, over the last two decades, the self-diagnosed behavioral flaws she once found quirky changed to tragic shortcomings worthy of scorn and tinged with bitterness.

Mitchell contends she never planned to go public about her search for her daughter, but rather was sold out by some friends back in Saskatchewan who told all when someone in the press decided to follow her clues. I believe her. But I also believe a day never went by when she didn't think about her daughter and, eventually, she could have ended up on Larry King if it meant facilitating their meeting.

Lucky for both, it didn't come to that. And though it probably came to enough for a week in April, the smile on Mitchell's face in Vanity Fair -- and she already possessed one of the world's great smiles -- tells you (as if you really didn't know) it was worth it. It is the blissful, unguarded grin of deliverance.

I'm well aware of the risks of reading too much into the headlines of a story in full froth or a subsequent puff piece in Vanity Fair. But there is no comparable risk in the interpretation of someone's art, especially when it is as good as Mitchell's music.

Even the most insensitive of clods would recognize how anguished Mitchell must have been to write a song like The Sire Of Sorrow.

Surely the same person would also realize that a woman with that kind of intelligence is motivated by something nobler than mere publicity.