Track Listing

1. One Week Last Summer
2. This Place
3. If I Had a Heart
4. Hana
5. Bad Dreams
6. Big Yellow Taxi (2007)
7. Night of the Iguana
8. Strong and Wrong
9. Shine
10. If

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4573 in Music
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .26 pounds

Amazon.com
Joni Mitchell is generally considered to be the single most important female singer-songwriter of the 20th Century. Her new CD features 10 great new songs that resonate on the level of some of her all-time classic work, with much of the material inspired by Joni’s passion to save the environment. Her lyrics on the subject are truly inspiring.

Joni Mitchell Photos (by James O'Mara)

More from Joni Mitchell

Blue

Court and Spark

Hits

Ladies of the Canyon

Hejira

Clouds

Amazon.com
Shine may ultimately register as a "fans only" milestone, but it proves that Joni Mitchell retains many of the storied calling cards of her best albums. The searing lyricism of 1971's Blue and the penchant for self-redefinition hailed by 1974's Court and Spark make cameos here, but sadly, lesser efforts' drawbacks abound. True, "Big Yellow Taxi" reprises the environmental dystopia Mitchell first poeticized on 1970's Ladies of the Canyon, but the occasion only prompts new pedantic effrontery ("This Place," "If I Had a Heart"). In this regard, Shine's especially cloying title track marks the worst offender. Blissfully, though, "Hana" boasts a driving rhythm section and blurting squirts of electric guitar and saxophone in support of a compelling character sketch, and "If"--based on Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name--paints a lyrical message of affirmation in bold strokes. Mitchell's songwriting shines brightest at such singularly poignant moments where specificity of images meets the vagaries of the instrumental arrangements, and, in the end, these and other highlights ("Bad Dreams," "Night of the Iguana") definitively carry the torch. --Jason Kirk

Customer Reviews

Joni's autumnal masterpiece, and another musical step ahead
Joni Mitchell's first album of new songs in nine years finds her mourning the sad state of the planet, but with a newfound acceptance that all things have their place in the universe ("bad dreams are good in the great plan," as she puts it here, quoting her young grandson) -- including her own anger and disappointment. Despite the numerous Robinson Jeffers-like call-outs of money/corruption/greed/rage/war and the incivility of humankind, the album does not end up being disheartening, but the opposite. Her voice -- husky with age and chain-smoked American Spirits -- shines with a warrior's strength and defiance even in ragged armor, like Billie Holiday's late recordings. And most wonderfully, Joni is still pushing her music into vital new territory, foregoing the synthesizer-guitar textures of "Taming the Tiger" for piano, horns, percussion, and other warmly organic voices.

She boldly opens the album with an instrumental, which struck me as an ungenerous move on first hearing, but in the context of the rest of the album makes perfect sense on Joni's terms, which are the only terms on which she makes records, bless her. (Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young -- her true peers -- also specialized in weirding out listeners who expected more-of-the-same with each new record.) Every song gets a distinctive orchestration of its own, from the percolating "Hana" -- a portrait of an old movie heroine, an Irish bodhisattva disguised as a traveling maid, who had "a special knack for getting people back on the right track" -- to a playful reprise of "Big Yellow Taxi" rescored like French circus music. "This Place" has particularly sleek and engaging sound, blending lap steel, warm horns, and bright keyboards, with its reference to a neighbor in rural British Columbia who says, "When I get to heaven, if it is not like this, I'll just hop a cloud and I'm coming back down here..."

My favorite track on the album is the final one, "If," which advances the sinuous groove of "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" and "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" and other milestones into new realms. The lyric is paraphrased from a Rudyard Kipling poem, but Joni wrote the most stunning verse:

If you can fill the journey
of a minute
with sixty seconds worth of wonder and delight
then the Earth is yours
and Everything that's in it
but more than that
I know
You'll be alright
You'll be alright.

Fittingly, the title track "Shine" is the purest expression of the essence of this album. After reciting a litany of offenses against the spirit, she insists that the proper response is to "shine your little light" into every corner of your life. It's not polyannic New Agey jive, but more like the alchemy of heavy global lead into spiritual gold: with this song, Joni even transcends her own identity as an angry Cassandra issuing dire warnings to a culture that doesn't want to listen. She's no stranger to Buddhist subtexts in her work -- "Refuge of the Roads" on Hejira was, among other things, a tribute to the vajrayana master Chogyam Trungpa, and "Taming the Tiger" was an allusion to Tibetan meditation practices for quelling the ego's rages. In "Shine," the Buddhist analogue would be Dzogchen, the Great Perfection -- the recognition that everything is just right as it is, even the things that insult the ego and bruise the heart.

We're lucky to be alive on the same dying planet that she is.

Elegant and insightful
(4 & 1/2 stars) Joni Mitchell's latest CD is a most welcome return, and worth the wait. This was obviously a very personal work, as she not only wrote and sang the tunes, she also played the majority of the instruments and co-produced! (Two notable exceptions to the one-woman show are Bob Sheppard's adept sax lines and some sweet pedal steel by Greg Leisz.) The songs are classic Joni, sometimes swinging, other times brilliantly introspective, always thought-provoking. Some will almost certainly be added to my list of Joni Mitchell favorites, particularly the marvelous "Bad Dreams." Lyrically, her poetic insights are most timely, with comments on our destruction of the planet, the blindness of elected officials, the climate of hatred and tension which pervades, but also some much more intimate observations. To echo what others have said, as striking as this album has been the first couple of times through, I think it's something I will grow to appreciate even more in the coming years.

Very Important
What a great tribute to the ideals we all held so fast to during the 60's! Joni is alive and well...rasphy and sultry she still gets her message across. I enjoyed her new CD "Shine" so much I gave it to all my friends whom I love for Christmas! Pour a glass of wine, push "play" and sit back and enjoy every single delightful poem on this venture. The old girl still has a lot to say!To say it is easy listening would be rude, but easy it is ! Jazzy and earthy, the message of conservation and solutions comes thru loud and clear. And I loved it! So will you !