LOS ANGELES - She taught herself guitar using a Pete Seeger instruction manual and played ukulele while at art college, humble beginnings for a career steeped in prestige and authority. From 1968's self-titled debut to Tuesday's release of Taming the Tiger, a smart and spirited jazz-inflected pop album, Joni Mitchell has lived up to her billing as one of the rock era's masters.

It's noteworthy that she made the cut in People's "Unforgettable Women of the Century" issue, not under Divas, but under Creators, alongside Maya Angelou, Gertrude Stein and Grandma Moses.

At 54, Mitchell remains a daring alchemist with a restless muse, ignoring fads to pursue music that's classical, sophisticated, experimental and challenging. On her lauded 17th album, maturity and independence entwine in engaging songs about business and pleasure. Revered and imitated for the past 30 years, this lady of the canyon refuses to rest on laurels or slip into history's shadows. Artistically, if not commercially, she stands tallest in the current field of female pop sensations, who claim her as a guiding spirit and freely loot her legacy.

Though the vestiges of childhood polio limited her concert schedule in recent years, the Canadian-born singer returned to the stage with strength and style this year: touring with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan, eclipsing the female cast at Don Henley's Walden Woods benefit and appearing at the Woodstock-inspired A Day in the Garden festival.

She rejoins Dylan for shows starting Oct. 23 and stars in a Nov. 6 pay-per-view concert. Despite this decade's fixation on fresh noise, her reach is formidable. Janet Jackson's hit Got 'Til It's Gone was built on Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. On his current Timeless Tales, Joshua Redman does an instrumental cover of Mitchell's I Had a King. Her A Case of You appears on the Practical Magic soundtrack. She remakes The Magdalene Laundries on an upcoming Chieftains album, contributes two songs to Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World and sings Trouble Man on the debut album by bassist Kyle Eastwood (son of Clint).

Though Mitchell swore off the "degrading" interview process a few years ago, she recently relented. Over a two-hour lunch of pasta, cranberry juice and cigarettes at her favorite haunt in Brentwood, Mitchell plumbed personal and professional topics, from her disdain for today's pop to her delight in being a grandma.

Q: You've influenced scores of current hitmakers. Does it irk you that today's Joni-wannabes outsell you?

A: It's disheartening, but you have to accept it. They're not as good, because they're generational, and yet they outsell me 20 to 1. I go back and forth between accepting it and railing against it. A lot of copycats are produced by producers who study my work and try to make a formula out of it. They pit them against me in the marketplace, declare them the new me while I'm still alive and then don't let me in the game. That's frustrating and painful.

Q: You've also decried the ongoing musical chairs at the corporate level.

A: The chair at the top kept getting occupied and fired. When they fire these guys, they pay them millions to go away, more than an artist is ever paid, more than Janet Jackson was paid to be signed. There's tremendous inequity. "You failed! Here's $60 million!" What is that? So the money artists made was wasted paying these jerks who didn't know what they were doing to go away. That fed my resentment.

Q: So you voiced those complaints to your label.

A: I had a pretty bad attitude. I said, "I loathe and despise the record business. I'm beyond an unhappy camper here." We worked out some things. I didn't ask for the moon. For my self-respect, amelioration had to be delivered, things had to change. I consider it a civil liberties issue that record companies basically abandon artists once they're established.

Q: Did that happen to you?

A: Because of my experimental nature, I became an artist without a genre, so finally radio and MTV wouldn't play me. The label says, "We don't care if you sell records." I said, "That's the trouble! You won't put a penny behind me." I said, "Look, if I'm good enough that everybody is being compared to me, just let me in the game." My work is better: It's got more depth, more breadth, more nutrition; it's not the flavor of the week. It actually has the ability to endure.

Q: In such a deflating atmosphere, how did you endure?

A: I turned to Aesop's turtle: slow and steady. Every time the industry slam-dunked a project of mine and elevated something else because it was new, I had to wax philosophic and wait. I finally got impatient. It made me want to get out of the business, and that's where I was at the brink of making this album. Maybe the gods gave me a break, because all of a sudden people began to notice that I was undervalued and they gave me a lot of honorariums. They knew they should give me something, but they didn't seem to really know why.

Q: Why didn't you attend your induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

A: A museum is only as good as its curators. There's a lot of stuff sold that doesn't deserve to go into the Hall of Fame - the Fabians and Milli Vanillis. But they seem to put in anyone who had a Top 10 record. So the honor wasn't really there. And the expense! You're expected to go, play a free concert, pay exorbitant prices to seat your family, and they give you this trinket, a dubious honor. It was exploitive and I resented it. My time was better spent with my kids. It was my first Mother's Day.

Q: In 1965, you had a daughter you gave up for adoption six months later. You recently reunited with Kilauren Gibb and met your grandson, Marlin. Are they now fixtures in your life?

A: Yeah, I love them and I love to see them. They're very fulfilling to me. She's in the process of separating from her husband, which is always difficult. I just came through a divorce with my husband (Larry Klein) but I'm older, and we went right out on the road together. So my perspective is, "Surely you can get along and find the good things to latch on to." Easy for me to say.

Q: In the song Chinese Cafe, you sang, "My child's a stranger; I bore her but I could not raise her." Did you hope she would hear you?

A: I wanted her to know that she was on my mind.

Q: Was it difficult to let go of your baby girl?

A: I was very stoic about it. I blocked out the day that I signed the papers. I must have been quasi-hysterical. It says in the file that it was "very difficult for mother emotionally." I don't even remember. I was made to feel ashamed, but I don't have any guilt about that loss and the ugly gantlet of opinion you first walk through. I couldn't find another way. I had no money to put a roof over my head or feed myself, let alone buy diapers, and no one to ask help from. And I was wildly independent. I married (folk singer) Chuck Mitchell, and he said he didn't want to raise another person's child, so I had to give her up.

Q: Did you instantly bond when you were reunited?

A: The moment I laid eyes on her. She looked at me and I looked at her, and we made the same sound at the same time: "Mm-hmm." We had the same speaking voice. She looks a lot like my mom.

Q: In Facelift, you reveal a holiday-season rift with your mother, who complains that you and your boyfriend "shacked up downtown, making love without a license." Has she heard it?

A: She hates it, but she's coming around. When I premiered it in Canada four years ago, her take was that I disgraced her in front of the nation. I said, "Look, Mom, this is no longer our song." So many women have said to me, "That's just what my Christmas was like." It's so universal, especially between our generations. They're never going to let go, the war generation. Their way of thinking is too ingrained.

Q: In dealing with such personal issues, do you censor yourself or shade the truth to avoid revealing too much?

A: I'm always trying to expose a universal truth. It's easy for me to use myself as subject matter because I can take it. Most people don't like portraits unless they flatter them. Some themes require stirring up and sustaining an emotion that isn't a fun companion. When I wrote Facelift, my mother and I were at war. It was really painful. But if you're going to be in pain anyway, why not stare it in the eyeball and turn it into a jewel?

Q: In the title track, you label current music "genuine junk food for juveniles."

A: When I wrote that, I thought contemporary music standards had dropped off a cliff. I'd leave the dial set on a station for two days and try to find something good and I couldn't. I do like Sheryl Crow, who's self-sufficient, and Bjork, a fiery little thing. But I got sick about hoodlum songs that are turning white trailer-park kids into vandals. I'm not a blue-haired little old lady, but I think it's a bad cultural influence. This isn't hip or smart. We don't need a society of pimps and vandals. Why is this the cultural vanguard?

Q: When did the industry lose its artistic integrity?

A: When record companies went public, the records became poker chips. Once the stock market is involved, you're pandering to the lowest common denominator, and there are fewer people at the label to champion a good song. Look back at the Grammy song-of-the-year winners of the last 10 years. It's tragic.

Q: You were stricken with polio at 9. Did that influence your career in music and art?

A: I had athletic ability in a community that revered athletes. When I got polio, I could no longer take part in it. I lost muscles, especially in my back, and reflexes in my legs, so I lost my running ability and my competitive swimming ability. I've had a lot of body pain in my life, but I'm opposed to the AMA's diagnosis for post-polio syndrome, which says don't exercise, lie down and die, basically. Now I'm proceeding through polio as I did in childhood, with the attitude that I'm not a cripple.

Q: You're an unapologetic smoker. Has your habit changed your voice?

A: It's added some husk. With age, the high end goes, anyway. Barbra Streisand's having trouble with her high end, and she's not a smoker. Women sopranos retire at about my age. But Aretha (Franklin) smokes, and she's singing opera with a beautiful husky quality. I don't do things a virtuoso should. I think of myself as a painter who makes music, so I probably don't keep the instrument as oiled as I should. I've lost about four notes at the top. I've got a big range, so it's no big loss. I don't need to go sailing around the stratosphere.

Q: You're regarded as a strong and independent woman, yet you've never embraced feminism.

A: No, because I still see honor and grace in domestic duties. I also wasn't an anarchist, so I didn't fit my generation. Nor was I a nihilist, so I didn't fit the next. I never found an ism that was mine.

Q: What's next?

A: I want to record standards, where I'm just a singer and there's only one mood to sustain. My songs tend to entail more acting than singing. Instead of having so much nuanced drama to do, I'd like to sing some pretty notes and lighten up. It's the way I feel right now. I did most of my heavy worrying between 27 and 33. It made me strong but it nearly flattened me.

I thought so deep and so hard, it scared the wee out of me and I entered into a long depression. I like my life better now.