Joni Mitchell: "Shine" Song-By-Song Thread

Well, folks. We've done it. We have made it all the way to the very final album in Joni Mitchell's vast and wonderful catalog. I suppose we cannot completely 100% definitively say this will be her last album, but it seems almost certain given her health. I want to start off the thread by thanking everyone who has stuck around and continued to discuss this music and keep the conversation about Joni's work going. This has been an amazing journey for me personally and I'll reflect more on it when we complete this thread. The Travelogue thread is still open for discussion but today I launch this song-by-song thread for 2007's Shine.

Previous threads in this series
Joni Mitchell: "Travelogue" Album Discussion
Joni Mitchell: "Both Sides Now (2000 Album)" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Taming the Tiger" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Turbulent Indigo" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Night Ride Home" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Dog Eat Dog" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Wild Things Run Fast" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Mingus" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Hejira" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Court and Spark" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "For the Roses" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Blue" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Ladies of the Canyon" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Clouds" Song By Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Song to a Seagull" Song By Song Thread

Shine


Album Notes
Released September 25, 2007
All music composed, arranged and produced by Joni Mitchell
All lyrics written by Joni Mitchell
except, If adapted from Rudyard Kipling's If by permission from The Kipling Estate.
© 2007 Crazy Crow Music (ASCAP), All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Recorded by Dan Marnien at Castle Oaks Productions, Calabasas, California
2nd Engineered by Josh Blanchard and Chris Marshall
Mastered by Bernie Grundman

Package Design - Joni Mitchell
Art Direction - Joni Mitchell and Robbie Cavolina
Alberta Ballet "The Fiddle and the Drum" Photography - Charles Hope
"Stalker" Ballet Photograph - Clay Stong
"Stalker" Ballet dancer - Leigh Allardyce

Macklam Feldman Management
1505 West 2nd Ave - Suite 200
Vancouver BC Canada
www.mfmgt.com [email protected]

www.jonimitchell.com

For Marlin and Daisy



Shine is the 19th studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and was released on September 25, 2007 by Hear Music. It is Mitchell's first album of new songs since Taming the Tiger (1998)

In the United States, the album sold about 40,000 copies in its first week, debuting at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 chart;[11] this was Mitchell's best peak position in America since Hejira (1976). Shine peaked at No. 36 in the UK chart, making it Mitchell's first Top 40 album in the UK since 1991. In its first week on sale, Shine sold around 60,000 copies worldwide.[12]

In 2002, Joni Mitchell famously left the music business. The public first learned that she had returned to writing and recording in October 2006, when she spoke to The Ottawa Citizen. In an interview with the newspaper, Mitchell "revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade" but gave few other details.[13]

Four months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Mitchell said that the album was inspired by the war in Iraq and "something her grandson had said while listening to family fighting: 'Bad dreams are good—in the great plan.'"[14]

The Sunday Times wrote in February 2007 that the album has "a minimal feel, a sparseness that harks back to her early work," adding that "rest and some good healers" had restored much of the singer's vocal power.[15]Mitchell herself described Shine as "as serious a work as I've ever done."[15]

The album was launched at the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street, New York City, on September 25, 2007, with a film of the Alberta Ballet performing The Fiddle and the Drum, a ballet devised by choreographer Jean Grand-Maître in collaboration with Mitchell that had premiered in Calgary on February 8 that year. The ballet uses a selection of Mitchell's songs, including "If I Had a Heart" and "If" from Shine, along with images from her art installation Flag Dance, which are projected as a backdrop.[16] The album cover features a scene from The Fiddle and the Drum.

Shine is only the second Joni Mitchell album never to have been distributed by Warner Music Group, the first being Night Ride Home, which was released by Geffen Records after the company was sold to MCA.



Contemporary Reviews
"FOR three decades Joni Mitchell wrote songs that were equally daring in their personal revelations and their musical restlessness. They traced a woman's romantic and intellectual life in progress, from bright-eyed aspiration to cosmopolitan wanderlust to political bitterness, from folky sweetness to pop sheen to open-ended, jazzy excursions. Along the way her music spawned countless disciples and admirers, among them Herbie Hancock, who is releasing a tribute album, "River: The Joni Letters."

But after her 1998 album, "Taming the Tiger," Ms. Mitchell fell silent as a songwriter. She was suffering from the muscle degeneration of post-polio syndrome, having had the disease as a child. She called the music business and its star-making machinery a "cesspool," and she completed her major-label contract with albums of cover versions and remakes. Her last one was "Travelogue" in 2002.

The album "Shine," due out on Sept. 25, will break the silence. (It's the first release in a two-album deal with Starbucks Entertainment's Hear Music label.) Describing its opening song, "One Week Last Summer," Ms. Mitchell wrote on her Web site that she was in a house by the sea, looking at seals and flowers, when a bear arrived to rummage through her garbage. "That night the piano beckoned for the first time in 10 years," she said.

The new songs are not happy ones; they worry over war, the environment and a bleak future. "What's coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint," she told an interviewer. But the music isn't strident; it's inward-looking and rhythmically complex."
New York Times, September 2007

"Joni Mitchell is a restless woman, a fact for which she is both praised and cursed. Just when you settle into her groove, she's off dabbling in something totally different. She's a folk singer -- no, she's a pop star -- no, she's an avant-garde jazzbo -- whew, don't look now, she's recording with the philharmonic. Indeed, she has never stuck to a straight line.

It's that same restless spirit that caused her to announce several years ago that she was done, retiring, sick of the industry's "cesspool" and going off to paint and record no more. But that restlessness also was bound to bring her back. When you're an artist who thinks and feels deeply about the world and its environment, it's not easy to stay sidelined when she disagrees with the people running our country. So Joni's back, toting an album -- "Shine," out Sept. 25 on Starbucks' Hear Music label -- that addresses political, social and environmental concerns with the most grace of her career thus far.

What that means is, she's written a bunch of protest songs that don't sound like protest songs. Not what we commonly think of in the sometimes strident, Woody Guthrie, three-chords-and-the-truth manner. That jazzbo side of her is still alive here, twisting the chords and crafting arrangements with supple saxes and fretless bass. She's rediscovered her piano, it seems, and plants most of her notions within beautiful ballads. She doesn't shout or rail or wail. This is a welcome evolutionary step (sometimes even pleasantly regressive) beyond the didactic drudgery of her previous attempts at explicit moralizing -- see "Sex Kills," "Lakota," "Tax Free," etc. Much of the time on "Shine," carried along on the warm currents of song, you might not even know you're being proseletyzed.

In fact, Mitchell, a woman known for the gift of gab, doesn't rush into her surprise comeback blathering at all. The first song is a quiet statement -- an instrumental. She comes out of the gate with "One Week Last Summer," a pastoral little concerto between piano and woodwinds with seven verses, one for each day of a sublime week she spent in her house by the shore. At jonimitchell.com, she describes the inspiration behind this piece: "I stepped outside of my little house and stood barefoot on a rock. The Pacific Ocean rolled toward me. Across the bay, a family of seals sprawled on the kelp uncovered by the low tide. A blue heron honked overhead. All around the house the wild roses were blooming. The air smelled sweet and salty and loud with crows and bees. My house was clean. I had food in the fridge for a week. I sat outside 'til the sun went down. That night the piano beckoned for the first time in 10 years."
Chicago Sun-Times, September 2007

"Mitchell's lyrics remain poetic and evocative but more pointedly somber these days. The music is still progressive, ethereal in its blend of synthetic and jazz-shaded organic instrumentation. But the sound is spare; the 10 songs on the succinct album seem to float. Although Mitchell's voice (darkened by years of cigarette smoking) is nothing like the diamond soprano that soared through "Woodstock" and "Chelsea Morning" so many years ago, her coarsened sound is still inviting. She burnishes the lyrics with well-worn wisdom.

Where the acoustic guitar dominated her classic work of yesterday, Shine is anchored by the piano. Centering the lyrical focus largely on societal and political turmoil, Mitchell stays hopeful, as exemplified on the haunting title track. She remakes 1970's "Big Yellow Taxi," which years ago spoke to concerns of preserving nature. The newer version sports a staccato rhythm, accented by accordion, and fits perfectly in the context of the deeply contemplative Shine."
Baltimore Sun, September 2007

 

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First track:

Track 1: "One Week Last Summer"


We have thoughts from Joni on every song from this album.

One Week Last Summer
Alto Sax Bob Sheppard, Piano and all other Instrumentation Joni Mitchell

Instrumental

I stepped outside of my little house and stood barefoot on a rock. The pacific ocean rolled towards me. Across the bay, a family of seals sprawled on the kelp uncovered by the low tide. A blue heron honked overhead. All around the house the wild roses were blooming. The air smelled sweet and salty and loud with crows and bees. My house was clean. I had food in the fridge for a week. I sat outside 'til the sun went down.

That night the piano beckoned for the first time in ten years. My fingers found these patterns which express what words could not. This song poured out while a brown bear rummaged through my garbage cans.

The song has seven verses constructed for the days of that happy week. On Thursday the bear arrives.

• As told to Dan Ouellette:
  This was originally titled 'Gratitude,' and it was the first piece I wrote for this album. I was in my house north of Vancouver, and I was feeling so grateful for this place that I've owned since 1969. I'd written a lot of my songs here - nearly all of For the Roses and Court and Spark, but that was on a baby grand which proved to be too big for the space. I finally replaced it with a spinet that has an old Wurlitzer five-stop electric keyboard in it.
  After 10 years of not playing the piano or my guitar, I sat down at the spinet and this just poured out in the spirit of I'm-so-happy-to-be-here. I was just ripple watching and cleaning my house, watching the shoals change and Big Bird flying over. It was cheap thrills at a time when nothing in Hollywood made me feel good. I started playing the piano and at first came noodles, a nucleus of sound. Then the dam broke and it began to pour out.
  Later in the studio I added the orchestration. I had called my engineer, Dan Marnien, to get me a composer's synthesizer that had good orchestral colors. On past albums I had jobbed out the arrangements, but I wanted to do my own this time. I laid down the meat and potatoes of the tune and then I painted over that, skimming a little color around the notes, going back to my palette to see what colors worked best.
  Then I called Bob Sheppard in to play saxophone. This is the only song he plays alto saxophone on. All the others are soprano. It was his decision to play alto, and it was good call.
  
  
  This song won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

 

Nice work mate. When I get some spare time I'm going to go through these threads properly. So forgive me when I post late.
Thanks for going to the trouble

 

Shine
I actually really love this album. I know that not every Joni Mitchell fan does and many really dislike Joni's use of synths rather than live instruments throughout it, but there are qualities to Shine that really touch me. For starters, this was the first (and only) Joni Mitchell album that came out when I was a fan. As I've mentioned in other threads, I started listening to Joni when I was about 16 in 2004. At that point, it seemed like she was done as an active recording artist and I never thought we'd get another album from her. The announcement of Shine was a big surprise and I looked forward to it eagerly. I liked it quite a bit when it came out, but I have grown to really love it over the past few years.

There is a certain mood and feeling to this record that I find incredibly beautiful. I find the album very intimate and I love the blend of synthesized noises with organic instrumentation. I also love that so many of the songs are based around piano, as I have always loved Joni's piano songs and we haven't had an album as focused on keyboards since my great love For the Roses (which Joni wrote in the same house in Vancouver as Shine). I also love how tight this record is. Ten songs, 45 minutes and a very clear perspective. She writes about the world beyond herself, but as some of the reviewers note, the compositions are not strident and angry in the way that her mid '80s political work was. It is album that feels reflective about the world, rather than doom and gloom/fiery. It is somehow a very personal and intimate album about global topics. And the album weaves in elements from Joni's personal life, from things she had read...it really captures who she was in 2007 and (as I said in the Travelogue thread) I'm so glad she ended her career with an album of new songs rather than a project looking backwards.

I've been having very bad anxiety this week and listening to Shine in the car this morning was like balm to the soul.

One Week Last Summer
The first track on the album may be my favorite. I think 'One Week Last Summer' is absolutely stunning and it is one of my favorite instrumental compositions full stop. It is such a gorgeous mood piece that is instantly transportive to the peaceful, lovely world Joni was living in and trying to paint for all of us with sounds. She was feeling the beauty of Vancouver all around her and it inspired her to start writing again. It wasn't worry about the world that got her back to composing--it was wonder. The main piano melody is so lovely, the woodwinds (both synthetic and real) coming in add that warmth and clarity and the piece just takes me away to a special, beautiful place. I think it was a wonderful choice to open the album.

 

I learned a long time ago when I grew out of my synth-phobia that it is the application of an instrument, not the instrument itself, that makes or breaks any song ... There have been terrible usages of acoustic instruments, but they don't create the same technofear lol

 

Very good point. Yes, I agree. There isn't anything inherently bad about any form of instrumentation. It's all in how you use it!

 

What a lovely story to read as I listen to it. It couldn't be more dissimilar to the circumstances surrounding how her fasting from the piano ended with her spontaneously erupting with 'Paprika plains' while just recovering from surgery 30 years earlier. This is still very intriguing though. How age leaves the very gifted disconnected from a channel for their talent for ever longer periods and how the ageing artist must put so much of themselves on the line to pull off what a simple two week stint in the studio could do forty years before.

 

This is a statement album. She leaves us with a serious and clear message. History, experience and positive role models (like Hana) aren't stopping us from making the wrong choices in our personal, business, political, environmental and even spiritual lives. She despairs but pulls herself together because if her message can get some of us to do something against despair, she won't despair as much.

There is a much less obvious secondary message that I pick up on through being a Dylan fan there aswell though. The album is presenting a case for an alternative, more honest "Love and theft" of others' creative output. All her borrowed art on the record is just so wonderfully frank.
'This Place' is just a fantastically funny borrowing of Dylan's song "Spirit on the water" from his 2006 album. The song she hears him singing just makes her angry at the artifice of him borrowing from obscure sources hoping that even if he is found out it will all be judged as very clever appropriation, what a way to point this out to us all by stealing so clearly from the song.

 

Pass. I'll go back and say something nice about Travelogue, but this one does nothing for me.

 

Joni was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007, which I think meant a lot to her. She was at the ceremony and visibly moved (whereas she skipped her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction...) Our friend Herbie gave the speech:

 

The last one, already. Doesn't time fly when we're having fun. I feel quite sad there will never be another one.

Will start on it tomorrow, as it's way past bedtime here.

 

Looking forward to this, as I must have had it in my hand at Starbucks a dozen times, thinking "Joni did what?" but didn't pull the trigger, for whatever reason.

 

Next:

Track 2: "This Place"


This Place
Pedal Steel Greg Leisz, Soprano Sax Bob Sheppard, Guitar and all other Instrumentation Joni Mitchell

Lyrical Excerpt:
Sparkle on the ocean
Eagle at the top of a tree
Those crazy crows always making a commotion
This land is home to me.

I was talking to my neighbor
He said, "When I get to heaven, if it is not like this,
I'll just hop a cloud and I'm coming right back down here
Back to this heavenly bliss."

Complete Lyrics at Joni Mitchell's Official Site

As told to Dan Ouellette:

This song is about preventing a catastrophe.

When I first moved to this place, it was rural and the land's function hadn't been designed. It contained the remnants of the logging industry, and most of the people who lived here were poor. No one knew about it. I knew that sometimes a famous person moving in can start a gentrification movement, so I've been very quiet here for 30-plus years. But now, five miles away on the Sunshine Coast, developers are beginning to clear cut areas so the wealthy people can build houses and bring in their yachts. And then we learned that we don't own the mineral rights to our land. A company started poking around, wanting to tear a mountain down for gravel, then build a giant conveyor belt out into the ocean where the gravel would be picked up by huge diesel-powered boats several times a day. The deal ended up falling through, but it still concerns everyone living here.

The song talks about my neighbor, caretaker and friend, Hans, 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..." It ends with the line about having the "genius to save this place." I remember an actor in L.A. telling me once that everyone's a genius. I didn't agree with him, but then I thought, wouldn't it be nice if that were true.

 

This Place
Joni was obviously deeply concerned about the environment at the time she was writing Shine, as it is a theme that comes up over and over again throughout the album. She celebrates the absolute beauty of the world around here, while worrying deeply that this beauty will be spoiled by industry and money. 'This Place' is an interesting song that juxtaposes the peace and tranquility of her home in Vancouver (in the first few verses) with her worries about 'big money' coming in to destroy it. I have many of the same fears as Joni and I hate to see our beautiful world get taken advantage of and wrecked for the sake of profit. This is a very real and very concerning part of the modern world and it will only get worse as we move into the future. But I like how 'This Place' tackles the subject--she presents us with her wonderful home so that we will fear for it as she does. I relate to her neighbor saying that heaven might not be as good as his earthly life--what a good line, and I've felt that way on occasion. You know, if the angels don't sing songs as good as Joni Mitchell I had it better on earth! I also love how she brings in reference to her friend the bear again, saying he's going through her trash cans and getting so bold but he has a right to roam the land just like the people do. The music creates a peaceful and tranquil sound that captures the bliss of the oceanside very well--and I sincerely hope that industry has not torn up the area in the decade+ since this album came out.

 

Big Joni fan but haven't delved into this album--which I am now inspired to do.

This thread is GOLD

 

Thank you! I hope you give the album a listen and report back with your impressions.

 

You've described beautifully what the song depicts verbally.

 

"One Week Last Summer" is a lovely introduction to this record. It would have been a terrific reprise to conclude the album, as well, in my opinion.

 

"This Place" is also a lovely song. Like Joni, I have spent much of my life living in rural Canada - on the prairies, which is so beautiful, calm & peaceful and now at the foot of the Rocky Mountains - just as beautiful, calm & peaceful. I have lived in cities, but I don't really ever plan on that again. So many of the lines in the song hit home for me in that way.
I also spend time in Costa Rica each year. A Tico friend of mine there told me once in reference to the amount of garbage that can sometimes be around that at least it is not all concrete and pavement.

 

Just FYI, Sechelt, where Joni lives isn’t really “Vancouver” — broadly speaking it’s the same region of British Columbia but it’s an hour and a half and a ferry ride up the coast. As she mentions the area is called the Sunshine Coast, despite the gallons of rain that fall on it (and Vancouver) every year. (I don’t know if she’s able to go up there anymore?)

 

This is the frustration of being so used to YouTube giving us everything and not having an alternative when it doesn't. I can't back up my theory about the similarities between "This Place" and the Dylan song from two years earlier "Spirit on the water". I think it is striking, intentional from her as a way of saying to us that she's capable of another form of borrowing than he has become famed for. The feel of the two songs sonically the melody in the verses and the opening reference to 'spiritual waters' and where or who 'heaven' might be match up to my ears nicely.
I'm less inclined to see it as subtle chiding by Joni of Dylan now. It might be she actually likes his song. Or as most of you will probably think, this is my imagination running away with me. Unfortunately the YouTube videos are all for live versions of Dylan's song not the album version, which is the one I'm basing my theory on.

 

It's an interesting theory, but I can't say I hear much of a similarity between the two songs myself. I really enjoy both, though.

Next:

Track 3: "If I Had a Heart"


If I Had A Heart
Pedal Steel Greg Leisz, Drums Brian Blade, Bass Larry Klein, Piano and all other Instrumentation Joni Mitchell

Lyrical Excerpt:
There's just too many people now
And too little land
Too much rage and desire
It makes you feel so feeble now
It's so out of hand-
Big bombs and barbed wire...
Can't you see
Our destiny?
We are making this Earth
Our funeral pyre!

Complete Lyrics at Joni Mitchell's Official Site

As told to Dan Ouellette:

I spent a couple of years in anger. I had fallen into a place where there was a lot of shaming and blaming, which I believe is the lowest level of evil. It conspires to having a bad heart - a heart poisoned with anger. I did a lot of weeping for what's happening to the earth when I was in my twenties. I could see a lot of things coming. Now I feel kind of inoculated to what people are now just discovering. If they're waking up and seeing it, they're in pain and they're feeling helpless.

This is a lamentation that asks the question, what can we do when we feel feeble, when we feel that things are so out of hand. How can we heal the holy earth? I may feel like a flea on a dinosaur, but I'm still kicking it in the shins.

 

If I Had a Heart
I'm very glad for the explanation from Joni on this particular song. I didn't initially understand the lyrical motif because Joni has shown us time and time again throughout her career that she most certainly does have a heart and a great capacity for emotion. But now I see that she is using the phrase to express her feelings of futility in the face of all the terrible things in the world. If she were able to do anything about it, she would, but all she can do now is feel and try to help in her own small ways. We can't think of ourselves as helpless or nothing will ever get done. Her thoughts about environmentalism are on display again (a major theme of this entire record) and I end up thinking this is a very strong composition. I love the piano melody and getting a little bit of bass from Larry. It feels like a complete and well-presented statement and it comes from a place of grief rather than a place of anger--which is vastly different from how Joni was writing in the mid '80s.

 

Not sure we have real grieving here. Not the kind of personal grief expressed on Patti Smith's 'Gone Again' album (for the purpose of exaggerated contrast). I'm all for saying it's truer, better articulated anger after all.
This despite Joni's remarks in her notes to the contrary. I don't agree with her that anger is synonymous with a bad heart. Pent up, unvented anger, most certainly does immense harm though.

 

I have always thought this track is simply beautiful - and somehow heartbreaking. Always brings a tear to my eyes.
It’s just a shame it’s so little known. I know some quite keen Joni fans who had never heard it before (well, that applies to the whole album really).
I rate the song as one of Joni’s absolute gems.