Joni Mitchell shines on Shine
p2pnet news | Music:- “Hey Jon,” emailed a Canadian musician friend of mine at the end of last month. “What do you think of Joni Mitchell’s Shine?”
She’s one of my favourite artists of all time, a fantastic, multi-talented poet and folk, blues and jazz musician and singer.
She’s also one of the few artists with international standing who’s had the courage to tell it like it is with respect to the corporate music.
I’d planned on checking Shine out, but it slipped my mind until today when I came across mention of it in an Associated Press story which says Mitchell released her last album with new material, “Taming the Tiger,” in 1998, going on:
“Then she stopped writing new songs, or even playing piano and guitar. She also had become focused on building the fragile relationship with her newly found daughter and grandchildren. ‘I had gotten to hate music,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t listen to the radio … for my own pleasure or put records on. I couldn’t remember what I ever liked about it.’
“Mitchell fulfilled her Warner Bros. contract with the orchestral albums “Both Sides Now” (2000) and “Travelogue” (2002) on which she sang jazz standards and her old songs like “Woodstock” and “A Case of You.” Then she “slipped off” into retirement.
“My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television,’ she says in the story.
“I thought, ‘Oh, is this the rest of my life’?”
Smell the coffee ….
“I’ve been screwed from the beginning,” Mitchell also once said, going on, “it was like slave labor, really – no points, no budget. And I’ve never really had a good deal in the business.”
Full of “pornographic pigs,” it’s, “all calculated music,” she also declared. “It’s calculated for sales, it’s sonically calculated, it’s rudely calculated. I’m ashamed to be a part of the music business. You know, I just think it’s a cesspool.”
Her comments are particularly relevant at a time when the Big 4, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, are going flat out to persecute their own customers, trying to sue them into becoming compliant consumers.
But new album? I had no idea. The last I heard, which was back in 2002, she’d retired.
Now, Shine, hitches on the, “burgeoning protest bandwagon,” says Bloomberg News, going on:
“Fears that the hell in Iraq and environmental catastrophe are putting the world at peril have proved too much for Mitchell, now a 63-year-old grandmother.”
She has enough power to push any protest immediately into world headlines without any help from anyone, anywhere.
But sadly, she decided to align herself with the giant coffee company Starbucks, releasing Shine on Starbucks’ Hear Music music label.
On it, Mitchell revisits Big Yellow Taxi, “though she shies away from a radical reworking by an angry older woman,” says Bloomberg, adding:
The main difference is that her 2007 voice is lower – it has steadily dropped, the result of decades of cigarette smoking, since the crystal-cut soprano peaks on the 1968 ‘Song to a Seagull’.
The girlish laugh is replaced by a world-weary drawl, and it’s now even scarier to hear her sing about putting all the trees in a tree museum.
Says the Boston Globe, “The company asked her to create a compilation for its series highlighting the influences of seminal musicians, and she was inspired to write again after listening once more to her heroes.”
Mitchell recruited, “an impeccable combo to augment her own elegant yet quirky piano and guitar work on 10 sumptuous compositions that meander pleasantly from smoky Latin-flavored jazz to folk both contemplative and electro,” says the story.
“In the United States, the album sold about 40,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number 14 on the Billboard 200 chart,” says the Wikipedia, pointing out it’s Mitchell’s, “best peak position in America since 1976’s Hejira”.
It also peaked at #36 in the UK charts, “making it Mitchell’s first Top 40 album in the UK since 1991,” says the post, noting, “In its first week on sale, Shine sold around 60,000 copies worldwide.”
And Yes —- it’s on the P2P networks.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Also See:
Associated Press – Joni Mitchell’s muse returns on ‘Shine,’ October 11, 2007
screwed from the beginning – Us, Them, p2p and file sharing, December 9, 2006
Bloomberg News – Joni Mitchell CD Makes Quiet Protest Over a Starbucks, September 25, 2007
Boston Globe – ‘Shine’ is inspired but angry, September 25, 2007
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