Product Description

The world almost didn't get another Joni Mitchell album after she announced her retirement following 2002's TRAVELOGUE.Whatever her reasons for changing her mind five years down the line, the sheer inspiration behind SHINE is obvious. Herfirst album of new material in nine years, SHINE finds Mitchell adopting a more intimate approach (especially in contrast to the massive orchestrations of TRAVELOGUE), handling many of the instrumental duties herself. In fact, it's her unconventional approach to both acoustic and electronic instruments that gives the album much of its singular charm; unusually organic synthesizer stabs and skittering electronic percussion rub shoulders with oddball guitar tunings and spiderypiano lines.
Lyrically, Mitchell melds poetic imagery with sociopolitical themes more seamlessly than she's done in some time, and even revisits one of her earliest songs in this mode, with a perky recasting of her chestnut "Big Yellow Taxi". Listening to the level of artistic urgency apparent on SHINE, it's difficult to imagine Mitchell could have ever really believed she had nothing left to say.

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: #7669 in Music
• Released on: 2007-09-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .26 pounds
• Running time: 47 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review

In 2002, Joni Mitchell--folk legend and creator of timeless albums like Blue, Hejira and The Hissing of Summer Lawns--went into retirement. Following the release of that year’s Travelogue album, she denounced the music industry and at the same time announced plans to pursue her other passion: painting. Shine, Mitchell’s 17th studio album and her first collection of new songs in almost a decade, is therefore something of a surprise. Inspired by the need to speak out against warmongering politicos and environmental myopia, Mitchell has written ten elegant, sparse songs that match idiosyncratic arrangements (think chamber folk merged with curious 80s drum sounds and painterly daubs of sax and guitar) with incisive lyricism and her classic story-telling technique. Opening instrumental "One Week Last Summer" sets an optimistic tone, but the album veers mostly between melancholy, introspection, bitterness and even misanthropy. Mitchell’s voice is more cracked than it used to be--but there’s no denying her passion, nor her continued ability to write engaging tunes. -- Paul Sullivan

Customer Reviews

A Joni Renaissance
Joni's first album of original material in nearly ten years was always sure to rouse excitement and curiosity as to whether she was able to match the intensity and originality of her previous albums.
Well 'Shine' does not dissapoint in either of these areas.

After announcing a so called retirement some years ago, it's clear Joni's quiet observation of the world around her has inspired much of what you hear on Shine, with the instrumental opening track 'one week last summer' easing you gently back to Joni's world and reminding you of what a talented musician she is.

Sure her trademark voice has deepened, but it fits the content and tone of the album perfectly. The stand out tracks of the album are the brilliant spine tingling 'Shine' in which Joni speaks of hope and fear for our planet in equal measure, and the brilliant re-interpretation of Kipling's poem 'If'.

'Shine' is sure to rank amongst the best of Joni's work to date.
Highly recommended!

A Beginning / An Ending (Or Something In-Between )?
A little late in the day to be sure sure but with good reason.

I wasn't sure I wanted to hear it but having bought the album
it then took me a good year to absorb its' wily charms.

'Shine' is a conceit of a sort you see.

The languidly marvelous orchestral excesses of'Both Sides Now' (2000)
and 'Travelogue' (2002) notwithstanding it has been almost
a decade since the last recording of new and original material and
'Taming The Tiger' (1998) could never be seen to have been a high point
in Ms Mitchell's long and illustrious career.

Having 'retired' from the business of strumming and singing in
2002 her muse lay dormant for a while but we can be glad that
she has set her paintbrushes aside and that those deep, dark internal
stirrings have once again percolated slowly to the surface in the shape
of 'Shine' - a late autumnal flowering and a far more worthy testimony
to the strange genius of one of the greatest writer/performers ever to
have blessed both our ears and our lives.

'Shine' is a very precious thing indeed.

Ten tracks - Eight new songs, an instrumental overture and one
canny reworking. Coming in at a little under 50 minutes the album
displays neither economy nor excess. Everything feels as if it is
in its' rightful place.

Environmental Destruction ( 'This Place' ); War ( 'If I Had A Heart' &
'Strong and Wrong' ) and Hope ( 'Shine' and 'If' ). Big Themes.

These compositions rank with the very finest she has produced.

The shuffling latin rhythm of 'Hana' ( a close musical cousin
to 1991's 'Cherokee Louise' );
the spare pathos and beauty of 'Bad Dreams';
the exotic, energizing grandeur of 'Night Of The Iguana';
the luminous relevance of 'Big Yellow Taxi' undimmed and undeterred.

Title track 'Shine' is nothing less than sublime.

This great lady's music had formed an important part of the soundtrack
to my life ( many of our lives very probably! ).
This latest installment represents a magisterial return to form.

Perhaps it may be too much to hope for further chapters
but we, like she, should always live with hope.

Essential.

The return of the canyon lady
A while back, Joni Mitchell announced her retirement. She'd found and become reconciled with the long-lost daughter she'd given up for adoption in the 60s, and had no more need to run the gauntlet of a corrupt music industry for the sake of writing songs. The composer of "Both Sides Now", "Woodstock" and "Hejira" fell silent.

However, her seclusion didn't last. As she told a recent interviewer, ""I tried to keep my legs crossed, but it didn't work." Enter an unlikely ally in the form of multinational coffee chain Starbucks, whose Hear Music label has recently tempted other ancient luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan into signing new album deals. The result is Shine, the delayed follow-up to 1998's "Taming the Tiger".

The album begins wordlessly. "One Week Last Summer" is an instrumental evocation of a numinous time when "the piano beckoned for the first time in ten years". But when the songs proper begin, Mitchell's words can still bite - "money makes the trees come down/it turns mountains into molehills".

There's little of the old romantic confessional in these songs of later life. Instead, she's decided to "put some time into ecology", as she hinted she might so long ago in 1976's "Song For Sharon". Like the wordless movie Koyaanasqatsi, "Shine" is a chronicle of a world out of balance: a world where technology threatens to vanquish nature, where "cellphone zombies babble through the shopping malls", where we are all but consumed in "the jaws of our machines". For Mitchell, we live on a planet we are slowly poisoning, and in "Bad Dreams" she expresses her deepening disgust in the vocabulary of a modern plague: "we live in these electric scabs, these lesions once were lakes". There's even a reworking of "Big Yellow Taxi", her 1970 warning against environmental catastrophe.

As always, her lyrics can read badly off the page but make sense in terms of a kind of musical conversation as soon as she scoops them up inside that voice. It's still the elastic instrument it always was, although its youthful purity has been roughened and aged by tobacco.

Her melodies are the strange and rambling things they always were, guided by her own individual logic: this time she's chosen to do all the arrangements herself, with just a little instrumental help from her friends - including ex-lovers James Taylor and Larry Klein. There's an endearingly eccentric (or is it ironic?) touch in her use of a drum machine which sounds as though it came out of the same technological ark as Atari and Space Invaders, but in her hands it somehow works. Such are mavericks.

Shine isn't perfection. "Night Of The Iguana"'s Latino jazz is a little too coffee-table and there are rambling moments elsewhere. High points include "Shine", the deeply compassionate title track, and "Strong and Wrong" - a wry, punning comment on conflicts such as Iraq. "Men love war/that's what history's for/a mass-murder mystery/his story"

All in all, though, this is a moving, subtle and clear-sighted piece of work. Mitchell remains thoroughly true to her past; still a lady of the canyon. If it takes the multinational coffee dollars of Starbucks to bring us integrity in these less than innocent days, well, then, so be it.