Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (30 page)

On Thursday, the sax growls a little on the low end while the rest of the sonics spill out in colourful fits and spurts. It's a song of home, and you can feel it in the repeated themes and the routine of the rhythmic piano. She carries the vibe onto the next track, “This Place”: “Sparkle on the ocean / Eagle on top of a tree / Those crazy crows always making a commotion / This land is home to me.” The laid-back Pacific lifestyle comes through in every subtle motion of Greg Leisz's pedal steel guitar. It's a clear gesture of love to the landscape, but she's no starry-eyed waif. “These lovely hills won't be here for long... here come the toxic spills, when this place looks like a moonscape, don't say I didn't warn ya,” she sings, without so much as a hint of judgement.

That's the bizarre thing about
Shine
: it may well be the most political and personally engaged, often enraged, album of Mitchell's career. But that's only the lyrics. Mitchell's voice and instrumentation, as well as the arrangements, are sweetly gentle. It's as though she's accepted every flaw and failing of the human race and found a way to keep going, despite the apparent futility of the endeavour, by coming at it from a loving place.

The record encapsulates Mitchell's oeuvre and her many voices—musician, composer, producer, and singer.
Shine
proves Joni Mitchell has achieved the epitome of the realized creator: integration through art. She has not become, as she predicted, “an ornery old lady.”
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She has become the wise crone. At least, that's what I think. Not everyone would agree with me. The critics weren't entirely kind to
Shine
—some felt the lyrics were a little scolding. As the
JazzTimes
critic noted, “[
Shine
] offers a somber prayer for the planet's healing by asking the sun to shine down on everything from ‘Frankenstein technologies' to ‘fertile farmland...' But by the second verse she has so much to say that she bursts the bounds of meter to get it all in, relying on Blade's flexibility to make it work.”
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The point is, it does work—even when she breaks the rules. Mitchell's last album proves she's come a long way from singing into a grand piano with a Byrd on her shoulder—not only because she's got a whole, largely self-created orchestra behind her but also because she twirled all the knobs herself. Ironically, this record also put her back in the coffee houses—the billion-dollar latte franchise Starbucks, which commissioned the work and distributed it next to the chocolate and cinnamon sprinkles.

Speaking to Charlie Rose at the time of the record's release in November 2007, Mitchell said the Starbucks project gave her back her love of music: “They allowed me to do this album and take my time at it. Because I took some time. You know, so I could say this album—let's just say where I'm at now, like my influences are beginning just now to come to fruition. It takes a long time for an artist to ripen. And pop music doesn't let you.”
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Shine
speaks Joni Mitchell's current truth—and the truths of all the versions of her that have gone before. It's the curtain call of albums and the one that articulates the most vocal, thematic, personal, and political integrity in a single package. It's also one of the few Mitchell releases that does not feature a likeness of herself on the cover: it features the troupe of dancers who performed
The Fiddle and the Drum
, which she called the “best project of [my] career”
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because it incorporated so many forms of creation: music, art, and dance.

Before we wrap this odyssey, it's worth addressing the last of Joni Mitchell's talents—and one she's never received a penny for: dancing.

Before we can draw, before we can speak, before we can scrawl our own name in the sand, we can dance. Dancing is more universal than music because it has no scales, no tunings or pitches. It crosses all human boundaries in a bodily act of celebration. It is the great democratic force within the arts, which is why revolutionary anarchist and noted intellectual Emma Goldman has been commonly paraphrased as saying: “If I can't dance, I don't want any part of your revolution.”
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Even the supposedly bleak Nietzsche understood it was important to shake your booty: “And let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once! And let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it!” he writes in
Zarathustra
.

Dancing isn't just fun; it's a language. German filmmaker Wim Wenders says he didn't realize how much the body could speak until he saw modern dance performed by Pina Bausch. His girlfriend dragged him kicking and screaming to a performance and, by the end of it, he was weeping. “It was as though I had learned a whole new language,” he says. “In forty-five minutes, Pina Bausch taught me more about the relationship between men and women than I could have ever known. Pina spoke with the language of the human body, and suddenly my body was telling me things my brain could not. Who knew my body knew things I didn't? This was a huge revelation to me.”
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Joni Mitchell describes herself as a dancer—almost before a musician or a painter. It's a passion she articulates on “In France They Kiss on Main Street,” when she sings “I love to dance.”

She says she first committed herself to speaking with her body when she came back from the brink of being physically dumb in the wake of polio. “Having my legs taken away and getting them back, by God, when I got 'em back I rock 'n' roll danced my way through my teens,” she says.
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Mitchell says she's always taken advantage of a dance floor if one happens to be lying around. Her love of dance is part of “All I Want”: “Alive, alive. I want to get up and jive. I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive.” She talks about dancing throughout her odyssey. “When I was vacationing on St. Martin, I used to go to a little disco several times a week to dance, and I fell in love with a song by the Police,” she says, drifting into a round of “De do do do. De da da da.”
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Dancing taught her not only to play with rhythm, and to feel, but also to accommodate the shuffle of another. “So there, when it was partner dancing, and every guy was like a different drummer... you learned to play with people who rushed, whose time was inconsistent, who had good time or laid back on the beat and so on,” she says. “I think that gave me, you know, a sense of rhythm which I didn't really [have]—my music was always very rhythmic but it had no drums.”
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To reiterate an observation by Bob Dylan, Joni moves to her own metre—in every element of her life—because she feels the beat deep within her, the beat of creation. This gift of rhythmic improvisation has given Mitchell the literal and figurative moves to dance through life and experience what she's often called “the magic.” Early in her career, Mitchell would observe in rehearsal: “The magic has arrived.” She believes, to some degree, that being an artist means being in touch with the realm of the inexplicable and the unforeseen. “I try when starting a record to not have too much of a concept,” she says. “I think it gets in the way of the magic—magic being those things that occur spontaneously. If you have too much of a roadmap in front of you, you can sleep through the best of the spontaneity.”
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Mitchell's self-awareness in the face of this creative muddle is astonishing, but it's no doubt one of the reasons why her oeuvre will stand the test of time: she embraces the process, the artifact it creates, but most of all the feeling she gets when she's taken nothing and made it into something. “[Creating] translates your mood,” she told Penny Valentine.

You can be in a really melancholic depressive mood, you're feeling downright bad and you want to know why. So you sit down and think, “Why?” You ask yourself a lot of questions. I find if I just sit around and meditate and mope about it all then there's no release at all. I just get deeper and deeper into it, whereas in the act of creating—when the song is born and you've made something beautiful—it's a release valve. And I always try and look for some optimism you know, no matter how cynical my mood may be. I always try to find that little crevice of light peeking through. Whatever I've made—whether it's a painting, a song, or even a sweater—it changes my mood. I'm pleased with myself that I've made something.
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Mitchell's limitless creativity is informed by the signs around her. Whether it was a crow flying in front of her windshield that made her look at her odometer reading “88888” or stumbling into a guy who just happened to have some much-needed wolf recordings, she says she believes in creative synchronicity. “I have a lot of voodoo following me around, whether I like it or not,” Mitchell recently told an audience at a $175-plate dinner. “I just know that this is a very mysterious place we're in.”

Being open to this mystery, and dancing to the magic of the universe, is what the creative process is all about, because it helps us find meaning in the seemingly random unfolding of events. The meaning is self-created, but that only brings the power of the divine back home. Mitchell has mastered the creative waltz. She can dance with her shimmering muse as well as her fragmenting shadow. Most importantly, she can laugh.

“I do have this reputation for being a serious person,” she told Cameron Crowe. “I'm a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that's the nature of the work I do. But this is only one side of the coin, you know. I love to dance. I'm a rowdy. I'm a good-timer,” she said, proud of her ability to kick up her heels when the world gets a little too dour. “There's a private club in Hollywood that usually is very empty, but on one crowded evening, I stumbled in there to this all-star cast: Linda Ronstadt was running through the parking lot being pursued by photographers, Jerry Brown was upstairs, Bob Dylan was full of his new Christian enthusiasm—‘Hey, Jerry, you ever thought of running this state with Christian government?' Lauren Hutton was there, Rod Stewart,” said Mitchell, offering an inventory of the glamour factor. “There were a lot of people and this little postage stamp of a dance floor, and nobody was dancing on it. These are all people who dance, in one way or another, in their acts.”
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Unlike her peers, who no doubt felt too cool to surrender to the primal beat, or too protective of a manufactured image, Mitchell wanted to move her body. “I just wanted to dance. I didn't want to dance alone, so I asked a couple of people to dance with me, and nobody would. They were all incredibly shy,” she told Crowe, noting an oft-overlooked truth about most performers. “So I went to the bathroom, and a girl came in and hollered to me from the sink over the wall, ‘Is that you? I'll dance with you.' I said, ‘Great.' It was just like the fifties, when none of the guys would dance. And it was at this moment that the girl confided to me: ‘You know, they all think of you as this very sad person.' That was the first time that it occurred to me that even among my peer group I had developed this reputation. I figured, these guys have been reading my press or something,” she said, laughing. “But as far as shattering preconceptions, forget it. I feel that the art is there for people to bring to it whatever they choose.”

Mitchell says all her art, even the dance, is designed to address the binary creative forces of life. “That's what I love about [the ballet]... You look at those beautiful kids and think ‘what a beautiful animal the human being is,'” she says. “But the words are very critical of [humans]. It's a stupid animal. It hasn't learned anything. It doesn't learn from history. It makes the same mistakes.”
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We're a deeply flawed species, but through creation we can be redeemed. “Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering,” says Nietzsche.
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“But that the creator may exist, that itself requires suffering and much transformation.” Finding “the dancing god within” is a process, because humankind is a work in progress. As Heidegger says: “Being's poem, just begun, is man.”
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Mitchell the poet, the singer, and the dancer let her life become a living testament to creative courage. The ire and the irritation in the face of humanity's stunted growth is always present in her oeuvre, but thanks to her unflagging creative output, she found a sense of palpable inner peace and wholeness that echoes through her final album as she urges us to “let our little lights shine” on all the good and all the bad. There is integration and acceptance of the human duality and, through this achievement, she can rejoice in her existence.

Nietzsche says, “You need chaos in you to give birth to a dancing star,”
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and Mitchell combusted without compare. Her life lights up the night sky like a continuous big bang. She is a true star, but she's not seeking followers. She's seeking to enlighten, as the last words she utters on a recording make perfectly clear. The final track on
Shine
is an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's poem “If,” and it underscores the potential for all human beings to find the same balance and pulsing heavenly brilliance.

If you can keep your head
While all about you
People are losing theirs and blaming you
If you can trust yourself
When everybody doubts you
And make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can wait
And not get tired of waiting
And when lied about
Stand tall
Don't deal in lies
And when hated
Don't give in to hating back
Don't need to look so good
Don't need to talk too wise.

If you can dream
And not make dreams your master
If you can think
And not make intellect your game
If you can meet
With triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same.