Joni Mitchell, Shine
Dame Joan gazes from her L.A. eyrie — and doesn't like what she sees.
In 2002, Joni Mitchell declared she was done with the music biz and would never, ever, make another album. I can't have been the only fan that didn't believe her. For, bless her, Dame Joan does love the sound of her own voice. On the Starbucks-spawned Shine, that nicotine-scorched instrument holds forth — as it has done since 1985's Dog Eat Dog — on the many ills that beset our world, its musical backdrop her favored spare setting (since 1994's Turbulent Indigo anyway) of piano, percussion and twittering soprano sax. Huskily it wails and rails on the Big Issues: war ("Strong and Wrong"), the environment ("This Place"); more war ("Bad Dreams are Good"), and more environment ("If I Had a Heart"). Mitchell gazes down from her L.A. eyrie and likes not what she sees.
Most of the time the spiky self-righteousness is redeemed by the mournful melodicism: there are magical passages on "If I Had a Heart" and "Hana," on "Bad Dreams Are Good" and "Night of the Iguana." But revisiting the 1970 ecology classic "Big Yellow Taxi" is a letdown and the closing adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If" (with Herbie Hancock on piano) drones on interminably. Joni's last truly great song may have been "Man from Mars" on 1998's Taming the Tiger, her last great performance the stunning re-arrangement of "Amelia" on 2002's Travelogue. Nothing on Shine touches either of those.
