The announcement that the elusive Joni Mitchell— whose last live concert had been more than a decade back—would sing again in New York came a day before curtain. No drumrolls from flacks - just a notice on the chalkboard of a basement club in Greenwich Village. But there was time enough for nearly every music celebrity in town to cancel other plans. The atmosphere at Fez - where the stage shakes as the subway rolls by on the other side of the wall - was subdued to the point of reverence, with one lone exception: Chrissie Hynde, after a few pops, started yelling "We love you, Joni!" and "Joni, you rock!" Mitchell was flattered. But Carly Simon suggested that Hynde clam up. Bad move. Hynde wrapped her arms around Simon's neck while Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's publicist, turned white. Natalie Merchant stayed out of the fray.

"That," said Hynde, referring to Mitchell, "is a real singer." Simon exited in a huff. Afterward, an enthusiastic Hynde "climbed me like a telephone pole," Mitchell would recall.

"I was a little in the bag," Hynde told me, "but she was fantastic, brilliant. I was probably going a little over the top because people speak of her in hushed tones.... She's a great singer, she plays great. She's always looked fantastic, but never flashed her tits. The only thing she ever flaunted was her songs.... I was yelling, 'Go for it, bitch!' She's only human - everyone needs to be told they're loved."

The Fez gig—November 6, 1995, the night before Mitchell turned 52— kicked off a year or more of celebration and renewal, in which she returned from the Siberia of show business found the daughter whom she never known. It was a magic time, with medals proffered and praises sung from podiums. Mitchell wryly dubbed it her "Year of Honor and Humility."

"Humility, of course, is the appropriate response," she said, sucking on one of her ubiquitous cigarettes, midway through the Annum Honorarium. "But it is very difficult to respond with humility when most of the honorariums are so rigged. It's very hard to find humility when you have to watch these people, who are supposedly honoring you, patting themselves on the back. I reach the podium in a state of arrogance," she said, starting to hoot at herself, "knowing it's inappropriate."

It has taken Mitchell 30 years of being music's whiz kid to land on the honor roll. By the time she hit the mainstream and critics realized just how boldly her music I was straining against the folk genre's homespun concerns, she had metamorphosed—with the album Court and Spark—into a Malibu Trouble Child with an unflinching eye on modern life and an ear for fluid chord progressions. Then it was jazz—old Beale Street, Charles Mingus, and beyond. Constant, however, has been Mitchell's sense of herself as a traveler and explorer, a restless daughter searching for the "love that sticks around" but refusing to surrender the wilder roads. She once wrote, "It never has been easy / Whether you do or you do not resign / Whether you travel the breadth of extremities / Or stick to some straighter line."

Mitchell's records chronicle a woman of morality and sensuality navigating an emotional journey for which there are no maps. She has unmasked love's illusions, along with her own failures and desires. In doing so she created a context that helped a generation of listeners understand what was happening when they went down the same routes. In a time when the old rules of love, sex, marriage, and fidelity were being rewritten, Mitchell's songs suggested it was possible to hold on to an ethical code in a world of "acid, booze, and ass / needles, guns, and grass" without relinquishing the mysteries of the trip. Constantly, Mitchell has pushed the popular song to new frontiers—an odyssey paralleling her quest to redefine the boundaries of love and freedom.

The theme of the endless journey was already in evidence on her 1968 debut album, Joni Mitchell, where she sang (perhaps with ex-husband Chuck Mitchell in mind) of a king "in a salt rusted carriage / Who carried me off to his country for marriage / Too soon." By 1976 she had left most of her fellow pop musicians in the dust. Reviewing Hejira, which many consider her finest album, The New York Times called the work "triumphant" and "masterly," concluding: "Hejira is not for comfortable background listening. This is no boogie album, no soothing collection of pop songs with handy hooks. Instead it is a series of personal statements ... assembled with all the care of a lied by Hugo Wolf. As such it is something not to be sampled casually and put aside, but to be savored seriously over the years."

Joni Mitchell stays up nights and sleeps until afternoon. She often lets the phone ring a dozen times before answering—there is no machine. Mail piles up unopened. And that's when she's home—in Los Angeles. Several months each year she disappears into her native Canada. Attempts to reach her through her latest lawyer or publicist get this response: "If you find her, will you tell us?"

Yet from her perspective, she's no recluse. If you drive up to her Bel Air house, she is friendly and happy to be social. She is, in her ex-husband Larry Klein's phrase, "instantly intimate." Intense, some might say, for Mitchell's is not a mind capable of passing back familiar dialogue. She is beyond conventions. "On the down days when things aren't going very well," she said of an artist's life, "do you have any friends? No . . . you haven't maintained them very well. Your thinking is too controversial. You're too intense for most people's taste, too psychologically astute.... But when the art is going well .. . it's a love."

An only child from rural Canada who grew up isolated by geography, illness, and a creative temperament, Roberta Joan Anderson learned as a kid to make her fun and be her own company. If you want to interest her, you have to offer as much as she can offer herself. As a girl she was infected in the same polio epidemic that got Neil Young, the singer-songwriter to whom she is occasionally compared. Their paths haven't stopped crossing, and the two share a toughness and clarity born of physical pain. Both made their way from Canada to California in the mid-60s and were managed by Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. Both fought with Geffen in the 1980s, when they joined his new Geffen Records and created albums that were less commercial man their earlier work.

After Dylan, Mitchell and Young are arguably the most important singer-songwriters of the rock era. But Mitchell s significance wasn't just talent "Joni was the pivot," Elliot Roberts says of the California folk-rock scene which ushered pop from the late 60s through the 70s. The band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was made up of Mitchell's first record producer (David Crosby); her friend from the Canadian coffeehouses (Young); his former bandmate (Stephen Stills); and her boyfriend (Graham Nash).

"We all looked at Joan as the seer because she was the most intelligent of the writers," says Roberts. "She was one of the first people I ever knew who always considered herself an artist.... You could see that her philosophy of longevity, of being an artist, would, in the long run, end up making you more money than if you tried to take advantage. Editing a song to make it a single was not in her vocabulary. I would remind her when she made a heavy left turn not to expect it to sell.... And the response was always the same: 'I appreciate it, thank you. Let's do it this way."'

Since Roberts and Mitchell split in the early 80s, managers have come and gone. Mitchell makes the big decisions for herself and often handles her own business negotiations. "To be honest with you," Roberts says, "not having spent much time with her in the last five, six, seven years, I really don't know what she's like now. I hear from people she's very bitter.... She was treated very, very badly. For her not to have been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a pity. She's as important as Dylan, as important as anyone has ever been."

Reports of Mitchell's bitterness are greatly exaggerated. But six months before the Fez performance, she was way down, swearing off the music business like a gambler giving up the ponies. She had made an album called Turbulent Indigo, which Billboard lauded as "one of the most commanding statements of a peerless, 17-album career." But sales went nowhere. After agreeing to go out and do press for it she was kicked up and down the public street. A BBC interviewer bushwhacked her with questions about the child she had as a young, unwed mother in 1965 and gave up for adoption. A song paraphrasing the Book of Job aroused murmurs of self-pity. Mitchell—who will tell anyone anything but a lie—was not prepared to be chewed by all the greedy teeth. When one rock journalist too many accused her of pretension, she snapped: "What have I ever pretended to be that I'm not?"

She returned to California exhausted from the tour and 10 years of plagues: car crashes, stalkers, earth-quakes, ailments of the throat, and back problems—a delayed result of her childhood polio—that made it hard for her to stand with a guitar for long periods. Her marriage to her sometime collaborator Larry Klein ended during the recording of Turbulent Indigo, with Klein departing the week of their 10-year anniversary.In spring 1995 she warned, "I'm threatening to never do press again. They chop you up. I ran into people who treated me like a criminal on this last leg, interrogated me like a criminal.... Any cooperation with the artist is seen by [the reporter's] peer group as collaboration with the enemy. I really hate the interview process at this point. I think it's degrading, I think it's a glut of crap. Why, when libraries are full of all great words on pages, do people devour junk food?"

But, because she didn't tour, the press was providing her only feedback. "I've never won an award for my songwriting or my singing," she said, ignoring her 1970 Grammy for best folk performance. "The only encouragement I have . . . are those fans who come up to me on the street. It's a very frustrating thing to try to make enduring literature and real music in a world that is suspicious of it and wants to call it pretentious. I've tried to make music that was enduring and classical with lyrics of the same standard, and I've been a recipient of prejudice as a result of it. America cheats on its exams. It likes copycats, it likes mediocrity.

"I love making records and I hate talking to the press. It's how Chairman Mao brainwashed China: it's Oriental torture. You're supposed to be this icon that transcends everything. 'Well, you should rise above that!' Nobody can rise above that! The cumulative psychological effect of being interrogated seven hours a day is how they break down hardened soldiers!" She laughed. "Have dental work done at the same time and you're a prisoner of war."

To calm down she threw herself into her painting, her second love. She exhibits rarely, and says she appreciates the fact that her music has allowed her to develop her painting free from the politics of art-world commerce. Her oils are witty, full of light. She fiddles with her work endlessly, sometimes setting out to fix a small imperfection and ending up obliterating everything. "All my little landscapes," she wrote on Turbulent Indigo, "All my yellow afternoons / Stack up around this vacancy / Like dirty cups and spoons."

Things began to brighten when Billboard announced that Mitchell would receive its Century Award for outstanding artistic achievement in December of 1995. Peter Gabriel told the audience, "I'm here to honor one of the very few artists I believe has been a real pioneer.... She has continuously and courageously experimented, putting substance before style, passion before packaging.... She's been a major influence on my work, as she has on many other artists as diverse as Seal, Madonna, Sting, Natalie Merchant, Annie Lennox, and the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known As."

In the wings, Mitchell was trying not to blow: in a filmed tribute, David Crosby and Graham Nash reminisced about her writing the song "Woodstock" from their description of the festival. That made Mitchell boil. Crosby, his fellow band members, and Geffen had decided that she should not accompany them to Woodstock: it was no place for a girl. Waiting in Geffen's New York apartment, watching the TV coverage, she had completed the song before the men's return. Now she fumed that Crosby and Nash were implying that she had taken their dictation. Crosby has a unique ability to get under Mitchell's skin. "Here he is again," she scowled, "tailgating."

After a huge ovation and a few thank-yous, Mitchell—to whom the formalities of Hollywood gratitude do not come naturally—felt she should actually "say something," so she continued earnestly, mapping out an approach to gratitude without submission. "I've been thinking a lot about arrogance and humility, trying to find some genuine humility to bring to this situation. But I feel like I'm emerging from the McCarthy era in a certain way. I never thought of it as difficult being a woman in this industry, but it has been pointed out to me in the last few days how few women there really were, and there were some strikes against us from the beginning."

Mitchell has always refused to engage in a discussion of herself as a "Woman in Rock." She was playing at the top of the game; she wasn't about to be exiled to the girls' team. But as she stopped having hits, Mitchell noticed that her male peers were lauded while she was ignored.

The Century Award led to appearances on The Tonight Show and an hour-long interview on CBS This Morning, where Mitchell introduced a quirky song, called "Happiness Is the Best Facelift," based on a scene with her mom the first time she went home for Christmas with her boyfriend, Don Freed (the son of a family friend). In her 50s, Mitchell is apparently still arguing with her mother over her behavior:

I mean, after all, she introduced us
But she regrets that now
Shacked up downtown making love without a license
Same old sacred cow
She said, "Did you come home to disgrace us?"
I said, "Why is this joy not allowed?
For God's sake, I'm middle-aged, Mama, and time moves swift
And you know happiness is the best facelift."

After the show, Mitchell introduced me to Freed, a quiet Canadian cowboy type who read a book while we ate lunch in the CBS cafeteria and fans lined up for his girlfriend's autograph.

In L.A. during January of 1996, Mitchell took a break from her new album and led me through her sprawling home—from the big wooden recording studio, across the broad patio and past the fountain, to the living room with its couches, books, and big stone fireplace. We paused in an alcove where her latest painting sat half finished on its easel. There she swung around, gestured toward the pinball machine, and said, "Want to play?"

Determined to impress her, I rang up a score of 114,670 and stood aside. She banged out a lousy 35,250. As I started my second turn, I made a crack about showing her how it's done, and in retaliation she moved in for her second round like a gunslinger. Dancing with the machine, she shifted her hips and dipped her shoulders as pinballs shot in silver blurs and lights flashed. The numbers flipped around like the odometer of a rocket ship: 200,000, 300,000, 600,000, 900,000. Mitchell passed a million—and kept going. Finally she relaxed, let the ball roll into the hole, and turned to me.

"Isn't it great," she said, "how sometimes you can feel like you're part of the machine?"

Looking for a new pastime, I asked about the painting nearby, a self-portrait in a wide-brimmed hat, holding up one of her cats. She had made herself look older in the painting than she actually appears, softening her jaw and deepening the lines in her face. She's not big on vanity.

I think this is the album cover, she said, but had no idea what to call the album.

"So what's the painting called?" I asked.

Staring down at the canvas, she decided: "I think I have to call it The Lion Tamer."

"So that's the name of your album?'

"Now I'll have to write a song called 'The Lion Tamer,"' she said as we returned to the studio, where she picked up an electric guitar. In loose slacks, a turquoise pullover, and soft boots, she worked beneath two antique photographs of some stern Native Americans who shared her cheekbones. She was hitting foot pedals, playing with a distorted guitar tone. "We know how to swing," Joni said, nodding to her new partner, Brian Blade, behind his drums. "Now we'll see if we know how to rock!" She made three passes at a rhythm track, each with a different attack, then listened and chose the second take. Her engineer mentioned that it sounded like Led Zeppelin. "More like a lead balloon," Mitchell cracked.

She was in a good mood. That day's Los Angeles Times had announced that she had become the first woman to win Sweden's Polar Music Prize, an award of a million Swedish kronor ($147,500) given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and presented by the king for outstanding achievement in music. She was also unexpectedly nominated for a best-pop-album Grammy for Turbulent Indigo. Then, as she was wrestling her guitar settings for control, a fax arrived of a piece from the New York Times about her continuing exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"Who's the cast of characters there?" Joni asked. I mentioned a couple of names, but when I got to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner she said if Jann were there she wouldn't get in. She has feuded with Rolling Stone for years and is able to enumerate its slights and insults. To borrow a joke coined for Van Morrison, Mitchell's capacity for holding a grudge is Serbian.

When I suggested that perhaps the Hall of Fame didn't consider her a rock performer, she punctured my naivete. "Rolling Stone used to call me 'The Queen of Rock & Roll.' Of course, there weren't that many of us. Me, Janis Joplin, one or two others passed the crown back and forth."

Later we took another wander around the property, a fantastic place—with terraces and balustrades and a . series of balconies—descending a wooded hill. Mitchell bought it for a couple of hundred thousand dollars in 1976, when hip Hollywood had declared Spanish architecture passe. But, in the earthquake era, it is expensive to maintain and repair.

Money is definitely a touchy subject for Mitchell. Though she is wealthy by ordinary standards, she is clearly concerned about financial security. Her first record contract, in the late 60s, was the usual crummy deal most young artists get. But when other singers started covering her songs—"Both Sides Now," "The Circle Game," "Big Yellow Taxi"—she drew writer's royalties. Concerts, too, were lucrative, and in the early 70s, when she made the classic albums Blue, For the Roses, and Court and Spark, she sold a lot of records. Bear in mind that "a lot of records" then meant 500,000 - nothing like the millions that stars move now.

And then she quickly abandoned the mainstream. On The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and the albums that followed, she pioneered experiments with jazz and world music which would be hugely influential for the next generation of rock stars—Prince, Sting, Peter Gabriel—but which cost Mitchell her radio play and much of her audience. She has not made money on an album since the late 70s, and has been drained by bills from doctors and lawyers, taxes, bad business deals, and battles with record labels.

"A lot of my real grief and bitterness in the last 15 years has been career-oriented," she said. "It's been rich people problems. The real deeply soul-disturbing things I've gone through would get no public sympathy. People like vulnerable artists. Why do they love Marilyn? People like balancing acts. There was a time in my life when I was a balancing act, but I stabilized, thank God. But people had to get used to dealing with a more powerful woman."

Back in the recording studio, she sat in a soft chair and lit the latest in a constant procession of the cigarettes which she won't talk about quitting. After another pass at "Lead Balloon," she started to laugh at the idea of herself "going metal." "When you play like this you understand the appeal of the big dumb rock guitar," she declared. "A little voice inside says, 'That's dumb,' but I really want to go ... " Sweeping her arm in a Pete Townshend windmill, she stuck out a leg like Chuck Berry doing his duck walk, grabbed for her smoke, and exhaled.

"Until the mid-60s " she said, "the technology hadn't developed to make a career like mine viable." I didn't quite get it; after all, she began her career as a folkie. "I had to be able to plug up my puppies," she explained. "Before 1965, I would have had 12 kids," she said with a smile. "I'm very fertile."

She told me about the woman doctor who pointed out to her that the IUDs made in the 60s had dangerous designs that wreaked havoc on women's bodies. She said this with no resentment or self-pity; she was just remembering the routine horrors of a time not very long ago.

"I never called myself a feminist," she said. "I could agree with a lot of the men's point of view. There was something very noble in a woman being willing to swallow her own dreams and devote herself to caring for her husband. There was nobility in that."

But, strumming her guitar, she acknowledged the obvious: "Not that I could ever have done it. I had this talent to feed!" She said "talent" as if it were a particularly demanding youngster. "A Gypsy told me that this is my first life as a woman. In all my previous incarnations I was a man. I'm still getting used to it!"

During the spring of 1996, Joni disappeared for a while— hiding out at the stone cottage she owns in British Columbia. Then she and Freed took off for Italy and from there for Sweden, where she collected her prize from the king. As she and His Highness prepared to enter the royal banquet room, a processional blared and the king told Mitchell, "This is good marching music"—and then strode into the hall. She mimicked him, arms swinging, and kept marching right past the head table toward the kitchen. The king grabbed her by the back of the dress to reel her in. The royal guests were stunned, until the irreverent honoree began to laugh uncontrollably and the king and his court all joined in.

Earlier, in California, Mitchell had won two Grammy Awards for Turbulent Indigo, including best pop album. She was radiant as she arrived at the podium with her estranged husband, Larry Klein, co-producer of the album, who shared the award. "Gee, Klein," Mitchell began, "considering we made this album in a state of divorce... " She credited the cats they had bought to take the tension off and then deferred to Klein, who thanked her "for 10 years of instruction in the arts." She beamed as the music honchos pounded their hands.

"That was such a warm win," Mitchell said afterward. "When everybody jumped to their feet at the Billboard ceremony it felt a little obligatory, but the Grammys was lovely. It was a sweet victory, it really was. 'Cause I'm a little guy in this business now."

Little like Napoleon, maybe. The winds of showbiz opinion were obviously shifting. In the Los Angeles Times, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson praised Mitchell as a huge influence. Then Melissa Etheridge told CBS, "She is the greatest female singer-songwriter." Maverick's R&B sensation Me'Shell NdegeOcello joined in: "I love Joni Mitchell. She just seems to be always trying something new. I think she's just fucking amazing!"

Sting credits both his personal lyrics and his vocal style to Mitchell. "When Ladies of the Canyon came out, I wore it out," he told me one afternoon in the Hamptons. "I played those songs and played them and played them. Her ability as a storyteller is second to none. But she doesn't get sufficient credit as a musician. She's underrated. She's a fabulous guitarist, and everybody knows she's a great singer."

Elvis Costello says that he has purchased every Mitchell album since the first. He recalls skipping school in Liverpool to take the train to Manchester and lining up for tickets to see Mitchell play. "She's compared to the wrong people," he said after a concert in New York. "The people that have been overtly influenced by her, with the possible exception of Prince, are nowhere near as good as she is. Her range is much greater. You know the line in 'Shades of Scarlet Conquering'— 'Dressed in stolen clothes she stands / Cast-iron and frail / With her impossibly gentle hands / And her blood-red fingernails'? If many songwriters wrote a description as good as that in their whole careers, they would be blessed— and there are five or six lines that good in that one song! It's not just that she has no rivals among female singer-songwriters. She has very few peers among any songwriters."

In June, I made my way back to Mitchell's L.A. house on the hill. The jacaranda was blooming, and she was waiting in the door of her hacienda wearing old clothes in which she'd been painting - a pale striped T-shirt, a denim jacket, white jeans, and sandals. Hanging on the wall in the alcove was the self-portrait with cat that she was working on during my first visit. She had modified it to mark the change from winter to summer: in the new version, Mitchell's hat and shirt were lighter colors, the sky behind her was a brighter blue, and she was standing in front of a paler wall. Maybe good fortune had started to sink in.

We headed out for an Italian restaurant where they let her smoke. "Maybe we should take one of your cars," I suggested. "The rental-car place was out of everything but this." I gestured toward the little shelled golf cart I had driven up in, a tiny plastic cube. "Do you really care what kind of car you drive?" she asked.

On our way to the restaurant, she told me that recently in Canada she had pulled in to get gas and the kid behind the pump had admonished her for driving an old bomber. She was Joni Mitchell! The other side of that coin was when she agreed to play a New York benefit, at the request of Joan Baez, but then learned that the old lefties in charge wanted to ask her a few questions first. She was asked, "What kind of car do you drive?" She answered, "A Mercedes." "Did you know," they demanded, "that Pete Seeger drives a Volkswagen?" When one of the interrogators saw that she was actually driving a rented Ford he seemed disappointed.

In the restaurant, the staff directed us to a secluded booth far from the dictatorship of healthy lungs. We started talking about what she would say if she were applying for a grant.

"I'd say that I was born with a gift of metaphor—which you can translate into any of the arts quite nicely—and a love of color: color for the eyes, color for the ears. And I like colorful people. Some of the people that have remained in my life entered my life in a colorful way. Carey Raditz [the inspiration for the song "Carey"] blew out of a restaurant in Greece, literally. Kaboom! I heard, facing the sunset. I turned around and this guy is blowing out the door of this restaurant. He was a cook; he lit a gas stove and it exploded. Burned all the red hair off himself right through his white Indian turban. I went, 'That was an interesting entrance—I'll take note of that.'

"Color is my first priority in the arts before form or anything. It's the spark. My mother said that as a child, before my verbs came in—at 14 or 15 months—I grabbed some oranges, put them on a purple scarf, gathered everybody in, and said, 'Pretty!' So color juxtaposition intrigued me. In the public-school system, I craved to have the box of 24 colors. I only had the box of 8; we couldn't afford the box of 24. But the 24 had magenta and turquoise and chartreuse and gold and silver and blonds in it. Oh, I wanted the 24!"

One of the mixed blessings of being Joni Mitchell is that random fans want to praise her for such lines as "I've looked at clouds from both sides now," when the lyrics she's most proud of pass without comment. She is particularly partial to "The Magdalene Laundries," a song from Turbulent Indigo that describes Irish girls forced to do menial labor for sins ranging from having children out of wedlock to inspiring impure thoughts in men. I asked about an image from the song, the nuns described as "bloodless brides of Jesus."

"I carried that for a long time," she explained. "There are images I carry for a long time before I find the artistic receptacle, the proper scenario to let them into. I never understood how the nuns could call themselves the brides of Jesus, the compassionate one, and be so hostile. I was sickly and in hospitals a lot as a kid. I'm not Catholic, but I had a lot of interaction with nuns in hospitals, and some of them were brutal, you know."

I said, "'Magdalene Laundries' had resonance, too, because you as a girl were an unwed mother."

"Which I'd rather not dwell on," she said sharply. During an interview in 1985, I had asked Mitchell about references to a child given up in her songs "Chinese Cafe" ("My child's a stranger / I bore her but I could not raise her") and most notably "Little Green" ("Child with a child pretending / Weary of lies you are sending home / So you sign all the papers in the family name / You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed / Little Green have a happy ending"). Mitchell had fixed me with a long stare and finally said that yes, she had gotten pregnant after going off to art school, had gone away, had given birth to a little girl, and had given her up. She would not lie about it. But it would hurt her parents if it came out in the press, so she hoped I'd consider leaving it out of my story. I did. But recently it had been in the papers. So this time I said, "You let the cat out of the bag."

"I didn't let it out of the bag," she shot back. "They went snooping around. In a couple of songs I left a trail for the kid to follow, and it caught up with me. It's juicy in this yellow day and age. A tabloid did this SONGBIRD SEARCHES FOR LOVE CHILD and my friends in Saskatchewan ... sold me out. I will tell you, I did the right of thing with the child. I had no money to buy diapers or anything. You don't want to flirt with this without telling the whole story, and that is really worse that The Perils of Pauline. To be a broke young woman in that position is Dickensian. You really don't want to know the details of how we were treated, young women at that time. It's just disgusting.'

As we ate and talked, Mitchell's enthusiasm worked its way back to the surface. When she surveys the cultural landscape, she is hilarious, flinging zingers like Dorothy Parker. The trouble is that, in print, her wisecracks can hurt others which makes Mitchell feel guilty later. So she is trying to curb her tongue. "I don't want to be known as the Truman Capote of my generation," she said.

"I really have had an interesting life," Joni declared as the cappuccinos arrived. "My father said to me one time, 'Joan, you've had a hard life, one could say. One could say you've lived several lives in one. But let's face it, most women are old bags by the time they're 36."' She smiled radiantly. "That was the time I brought my black boyfriend home to meet them. He sat in silence for an hour and a half and then came out with that so I don't know really where he was coming from. But his wheels were turning.

"Yeah, it's been a rich experience. The music has given me the ability to travel, to see the world, and to afford first-class art supplies. There's been a lot of illness. Polio probably did me good. Otherwise I would have been an athlete. I lost my running skills, but translated them into something less fast and more graceful; I became a dancer. I believe convalescence in bed develops a strong inner life in a young child. I think it solidified me as an independent thinker. Nietzsche was a convalescent.

"Everything has been generally good. I'm a serial monogamist. That's not that uncommon in my generation. Kind of horrifying to the last generation, where everybody stuck together. This generation, we're so worn down that nobody can stay in our company for any length of time. And in that way my trip was not that unique."

Which hit the nail on the head. Like the best popular artists, Mitchell has been a lodestone for her audience. Chrissie Hynde believes she still is.

"I think her authenticity combined with her age has injected a whole new interest into the phenomenon of Joni Mitchell," Hynde said on the phone from London. "People want her even more now. A lot of people make it in the music business fueled by just the exuberance of their youth. It's only time that shows you what the real substance of the man, or, in this case, the woman, is. And in her case, she's got it.... It's an affirmation in your own life that someone your age can still have substance, still have ideas, and still be vital. There's a million and one 22-year-old singer-songwriters, but what can they tell you if you're 50 years old that you don't already know? That's why it becomes even more important for her to be visible. I'd tell her, 'Stay in your hole and paint, but come out once in a while. What's it to you? Give us a thrill."'

Hynde's enthusiasm speaks for those in Mitchell's audience who have kept their ideals alive. But maybe the last thing some of Mitchell's old fans from the 60s want is to be confronted with the distance between who they set out to be and who they ended up being. But always telling the truth is Joni Mitchell's blessing and curse. She can't help herself. And her relentless skewering of the values of the 80s and beyond can make us feel guilty.

"I think a lot of times she's been too truthful," Larry Klein said of the wife he's been in the process of divorcing for three years but with whom he is still close. "I think she doesn't have any choice but to be absolutely honest. That's just the way that she has been shaped.... She tells too much truth, and it's interpreted as arrogance, as bitterness, as a lot of other things. Not to say that at times she is not an arrogant person; she is. And at times she is a bitter person. But she is a relentlessly honest person. And I think in our world that is something that people misunderstand. One thing Joan is not is a diplomat. But the further I go along in life the more I value pure, unadulterated honesty.

"I remember many times where we'd be out somewhere having a conversation with someone and afterward she would be mourning the fact that she had revealed too much of herself. 'God, I think I really fucked up by telling this person this and that.' Or in some instances a person would use some piece of intimate information Joan gave him to stab her with later.

"I think that pain can either drive you further inward or it can pry you open—as a person, as a writer, as an artist. In the last couple of years of our marriage and the time since we've split up, I've come to understand her a lot better. Because that experience pried me open to a point where I realized, Well, fuck it. I'm just going to be honest and open in order to survive. And I came to understand Joan's way of being in the world much better. For her there's no other way that she can be."

In the late summer, Mitchell vanished, holing up at her place in Canada again to write more songs. She came back to California in October with a couple of new ones; now she had 7 of the 12 she needed for an album. I arrived at her house one afternoon to find the gate locked and no answer to the buzzer. Luckily, Don Freed arrived right behind me, hoisted himself over the fence, and popped the lock from inside.

We let ourselves into the house, and a few minutes later a sleepy-eyed Mitchell came downstairs. It was two in the afternoon. She explained that she and some pals had gone to the circus the night before, and then stayed out late drinking and singing in a karaoke bar. Joni Mitchell may refuse all requests to tour, but she apparently gave her all to the patrons of this establishment. We went to an outdoor cafe in Brentwood where she eats almost every day. By mid-afternoon on days when guests do not come by, she has had breakfast and come home to paint or make music into the night. If no one distracts her, she will follow that routine for days on end. While she was tucked away in British Columbia, honors had continued piling up, the latest being the Canadian Governor General's Award and a place in America's Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

I asked if Canada had kick-started her inspiration. "The music is coming out real fresh. It's not like I've hit a pocket— there's still growth going on; there's still excitement there. And the painting is really growing. But every time you put the brushes down you lose your chops. You go and do press and come back. Everything's always cooling off and heating up and cooling off. I've got 30 canvases sitting in the garage, panoramic two-feet-by-six-feet shapes. And I'm just itching to do them. I know what they're going to be, but I need the time for execution."

"When sit down to write a song I have to introvert and introvert, because I like to scrape a little bit of how I'm feeling against the backside of what's happening around me and all of that. But I'm tired of scraping my own soul because of what the press does to you. So I'm a little defended in that way, yet I like it in the songs. It gives them depth. And I like the drama. I like to have the characters in an anti-heroic situation with a ray of light coming in."

"If you let fear of critics stop you," I said, "then you are saying that you are going to let your work be shaped for the people who hate you or don't understand you, rather than for the audience who loves you."

"That's a good point," Mitchell said. "That's what you tell yourself when you're giving yourself the pep talk. There came a point when I was sitting in this very restaurant telling the people I was with that I had taken my swan song and the waitress overheard me and began to cry! She said, 'You can't do that,' and she took that moment to tell me how my work had played in her own life."

Mitchell had no idea that the waitress cared about her music until that moment. Except for chance encounters like that, she has no way of knowing that anyone out there is listening, that her work is getting through.

She sighed about her record company's telling people she would do things she had no intention of doing. "Apparently there's this woman with a TV show in New York who keeps announcing on the air that I'm going to be a guest," Mitchell said. "Which I'm not. Do you know who she is? Rosie Donahue?"

I said that her name was Rosie O'Donnell and that she was the hottest thing on TV and had in fact been celebrating on the air that her hero, Joni Mitchell, had agreed to do the show. Joni said, well, maybe she'd do it then. The next month, November 1996, Mitchell went to New York to sing on Rosie O'Donnell's and David Letterman's shows and celebrate her 53rd birthday. The Letterman taping marked the one-year anniversary of the Fez show. That night Fez featured John Kelly, a performance artist doing a show called "Paved Paradise," in which he dressed as Joni Mitchell and sang her songs. Mitchell said, "Let's go!"

The Letterman appearance went smoothly after some preliminary hassles. Mitchell, ever the perfectionist, ran through a couple of selections at sound check, and was told they were both too long, she'd have to shorten them. She nodded, tried speeding them up, tried editing them, and finally agreed to do a faster, shortened version of "Just Like This Train." Everyone said that would be great, but upstairs in her dressing room Mitchell started stewing about it and had a quick tantrum about being asked to "amputate," as she put it, her art.

By the time she came downstairs, though she was pumped up. The Late Show band was playing "Johnny B. Goode," and she jitterbugged into the greenroom, where someone from her record company started presenting dignitaries to her. She was introduced to a marketing rep. He reached out his hand and Mitchell shook it. Then he gave her a thumbs-up and she gave him one back. Then he gave her a high sign and Mitchell flipped him the bird. There was a second of shocked silence before everyone started laughing.

She was then led through a door to the side of the stage, where she strapped on her guitar. Letterman, sitting at his desk across the stage, nodded to her. She was introduced, the audience clapped, she strolled out confidently, and went into "Just Like This Train"—beautifully, soulfully, and really, really slowly. She added a full 30 seconds to the rehearsal version.

She bounded out of the studio delighted. "All I lost was 30 seconds of couch time," she said. "What's more important?" Behind police barriers outside, a crowd of fans cheered and called her name. To the surprise of The Late Show security, Joni Mitchell spent 10 minutes meeting the people, signing their albums, and answering their questions. Then she dove into a waiting limo for the ride to Fez. "Maybe I have to stir up trouble and be a bit of an asshole before a performance," she said happily, "so I can shake all that off when I go out onstage and find the right balance."

The Fez is connected to a restaurant, the Time Cafe, where Mitchell had dinner reservations. While she and her large party ate at a table against the wall, Fez patrons began lining up to see the Joni Mitchell imitator. They did double takes, triple takes, and craned their necks as they passed the real Joni Mitchell. "You know what those people are thinking?" I whispered to the original Mitchell. "Boy, that guy is really good."

"I've written a rock song," Mitchell told the table. "It's called 'Lead Balloon.'

I wrote it for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It begins, 'You can kiss my ass."' The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, under steady pressure from The New York Times, had finally voted Mitchell in. She had not decided if she would show up for the induction m May.

It is difficult to explain the weirdness of watching a roomful of flipped-out fans twist themselves into whiplash watching Joni Mitchell sit in a small club watching a man dressed as Joni Mitchell perform her songs in character. John Kelly's only request when he heard Mitchell was coming was that she sit where he could not see her. So she stuck to a back booth and blew the damn candle out.

He appeared onstage to great applause, a tall man in a flowered hippie dress, beret, and bad blond wig, tossing his hair back and prattling on in oh-wow free association, while a pianist dressed as Georgia O'Keefe tickled the ivories behind him and a string player done up as Vincent van Gogh strummed. When Kelly sang Mitchell's early songs, he affected an earsplitting falsetto. He crooned "We go round and round and round in the circle game" to a rubber chicken rotating on a turntable.

When I summoned the courage to glance at the subject of the impersonation, I was relieved to find her laughing, clapping, and having a great time. I relaxed a little. "He's so sweet," she said. And somehow, as the show went along, the proceedings became quite moving. The audience was shouting at Kelly, "We love you, Joni!" and singing along with all the songs. And Mitchell started quietly singing along. And more people shouted, "We love you, Joni," turning as they yelled from the stage to her booth. And quiet Don Freed shouted at the top of his lungs, "I love you, Joni!" And Joni Mitchell was overwhelmed by genuine accolades she could not doubt or question.

And as this grace was breaking across the audience, Kelly's performance deepened. He sang the songs with the unmistakable devotion of someone who had spent hours alone in the dark living inside those records. By the time he sang "Shadows and Light" there was no artifice at all—he sang a powerful song with beauty and strength. And when it ended, Mitchell herself led the ovation, shouting "Bravo!" with tears in her eyes.

In the car, she was ecstatic. Her new manager, a Walter Matthau type named Sam Feldman, asked, "Think there's an audience out there if you'd tour, Joan?"

She laughed and said, "I'll send him out'"

"You were like Huck Finn in the choir loft, there," I said.

She nodded and smiled. "That was like going to my own funeral. In a good way." She sighed and looked out the car window and said softly and not without surprise, "All those people like me."

By the time Mitchell returned to California, some press she had done in New York came back to kick her in the head. She was angry with Stephen Holden of The New York Times for including in an interview with her a reference to her ongoing effort to make contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption more than 30 years before. Joni said she had considered that part of the conversation off the record. Holden replied, "If she said it was off the record I wouldn't have printed it." Over the Christmas holidays the Times piece spawned gossip items all across North America, more of the SONGBIRD SEARCHES FOR LOVE CHILD headlines that Joni dreads. Hurt, she went into hibernation.

In Canada, Kilauren Gibb, a 32-year-old woman who had been searching for her birth mother for about four years— since she had learned she was adopted when she became a mother herself—was told about the items and went to the Internet. She compared Mitchell's statistics with what she knew of her lost mom.

They matched. She contacted Mitchell's managers, who were used to dealing with impostors. This one turned out to be real. In March, Mitchell and her daughter (originally named Kelly) met for the first time in 32 years. On April 2, rumors of the reunion hit the newspapers. On April 3, Mitchell told me the story with more joy in her voice than I had ever heard.

"I met her three weeks ago," she said. "She's been looking for years. The agency gave her my bio but wouldn't release my name. All of this ugly press actually turned around in our favor. Somebody suggested to her, 'Joni Mitchell's looking for her daughter, wouldn't it be funny ...' So she double-checked the bio that she had against my Web site and started jumping up and down with excitement.

"She's a kindred spirit. The press is already exaggerating, saying she looks like a young me. She doesn't—she looks like a young my mother. She's got my high cheekbones. She's tall, five foot nine, beautiful—she's been a professional model. She is highly educated. She's been a champion swimmer."

I said it sounded like what Mitchell once told me she imagined her life would have been if not for polio.

"If not for polio, exactly," she said.

Mitchell was jubilant. As I listened to her talk, it felt as if she had found a missing piece of herself. She had found the person for whom, through all her periods of self-imposed isolation, she was saving a place.

The new album is finally finished—a few touch-ups and overdubs and it will be ready. Once, she had been afraid that it was too full of darkness; now it had an ending that was wildly optimistic. She recited the lyric of the last song finished. Begun as a poem for Don Freed, it took on great significance for Mitchell—the eternal doubter, the master of what she calls "the big but"—when her daughter told her that she must never doubt her.

So we should just surrender
Let fate and duty shape us
Let like hearts remake us
Let the worries hush.

"The record just keeps sailing up this optimistic note," Mitchell said. "The last song on it is an old Sons of the Pioneers cover. It's a goodwill toast. 'Here's to you / May your dreams come true / May Father Time never be unkind.' It builds to optimism."

Like this whole strange Year of Honor and Humility?

Joni Mitchell smiled. "It's been an exhilarating year," she said. "A fairy tale."

Letters to the Editor from the August 1997 Issue:

Bravo for the wonderful piece on— and fabulous Herb Ritts photographs of—the legendary Joni Mitchell. Just one complaint: Joni and her glorious cheekbones should have graced V.F's cover.
D. M. BLAKE

I want to thank you for what is perhaps the finest tribute I have seen to the artistry and genius of Joni Mitchell. One amazing thing about her music is how I can play her albums, hate them or not get them, and, six months later, be singing every single cut. Her songs have a way of seeping into you slowly until they permeate your consciousness.
CAROL LIPTON

Flanagan missed mining the more complex and strange Mitchell who has emerged over the years in various publications. For example, left untouched was Ms. Mitchell's odd relationship with other female artists. She reminds me of Milton Berle, who seemed to hate all up-and-coming comics. Mitchell is the best at what she does, but art is not a game of musical chairs, with only one seat allowed for "Talented Female Pop Artist." Learn to move over, Joni. Someone is surely biting at your heels.
MARY KAY DUFFY

Ms. Mitchell is the rare avis of female songwriters: she connects with the listener, who cannot help but love and respect her terrific honesty
MICHAEL ALEXANDER

I always claimed to be Joni Mitchell's No. 1 fan. I'm glad to see that I'm not alone.
ANN SACKSTEDER

At 42 years of age, I can listen to only one artist from my youth. Only one artist who has matured and continues to speak to an older, grayer, and perhaps more cynical man—Joni Mitchell.
ANDREW DOBO

On August 8, 1974, at the Pine Knob Music Theater, north of Detroit, Joni Mitchell strolled onstage and announced that the president of the United States had just resigned. We were all on our feet as a cheer rolled through the crowd. From Woodstock to Watergate, Joni Mitchell has been witness to the events of a generation. Her interpretations have been lyrical and poignant. I was happy to read that her spark has not dimmed.
ALAN ZIMMERMAN

Although I didn't qualify demographically to be a fan, thank God for my sister's taste in music and for the sheer talent Joni Mitchell has offered over the years.
CHARLES W. LAWRY

Would someone please let Joni Mitchell know she had twins! Joni, come collect me.
DAVID E. MORENO