Shine

Joni Mitchell | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 25, 2007)
• Original Release Date: 2007
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: HEAR MUSIC
• ASIN: B000UR366S
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (131 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #37,251 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

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

Product Description

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

160 of 176 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joni's autumnal masterpiece, and another musical step ahead, September 25, 2007

By 

Stephen Silberman "writer, Wired Magazine" (SF, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shine (Audio CD)

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.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and insightful, September 25, 2007

By 

William Merrill "eclecticist" (San Antonio, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shine (Audio CD)

(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.

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bad dreams are good in the great plan, September 26, 2007

By 

Van Halen (Twin Oaks) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shine (Audio CD)

It's a harvest moon tonight as I write these words and my life, to be honest, is in shambles. But it's also the release day of Joni's first album (of new compositions) in eons, so tonight there will be no hemlock, razors, sleeping pills or hangman's nooses. There will be musings instead.

FIRST, Wayne Shorter is not on this album; Bob Sheppard got the gig, and taking in "One Week Last Summer," the opening instrumental teaser, with an open heart, all is well... okay. Then, boom, the next track, "This Place," confirms (1) Joni is playing with a REAL (acoustic) guitar again (not that contraption she used on Taming The Tiger) and (2) her voice is STILL JONI.

Thematically, Joni continues her bittersweet observations of good & evil brought forth quintessentially with Turbulent Indigo. Her chords and melodies continue to roam unencumbered by market pressures. Ex-husband Klein again rumbles amorphously, drums patter unobtrusively, electronics whoosh abstractedly while Joni does her Joni genius sage thing in a lowbeat key.

If you're on the lookout for crafty pop hooks and clever poem twists, this might not be the vastest assemblage on a single Joni disc. No strings. Is it a keeper? Nobody gets to be 27 again, not even god(dess). If "Not To Blame," "Sunny Sunday" and "Last Chance Lost" still makes your playlist, then "Strong And Wrong," "Shine" and "Bad Dreams" will command your respect. Nothing quite as moving as "The Sire of Sorrow," though.

Joni doesn't sing about her affairs of the heart anymore. There are no motherhood revelations on display here. She sings, often sadly, of a world she likes to keep at a safe distance. Commenting on news stories, seemingly. And who can blame her? Most significantly, Shine features no new Joni paintings. Joni always did, and does, just what she wants - no more, no less. And we're lucky she deigns to communicate at all.

The only misstep is a new, unambitious version of "Big Yellow Taxi." (A backhanded acknowledgement of the Starbux push?)

My mother, age 71 and defiantly divorced, just finished the Appalachian Trail. That's a 2,000 mile hike, Georgia to Maine. I mailed her some cool earrings but maybe I'll mail her a copy of Shine, too. I love tough old broads.