Joni Mitchell has released her first album of new songs in almost a decade, Shine, and the result is well worth the wait. Its tone is generally somber, with one of the last great hippies looking around and, amid the chaos, violence and injustice of the present day, wondering what in the world went wrong. Disillusioned and somewhat bitter, Mitchell paints haunting lyrical portraits of a world full of babbling “cell phone zombies,” where our cities are “electric scabs” and our once-clean lakes “lesions.” The album’s not all doom and gloom, though; a piano and saxophone-driven instrumental opening track is tender and optimistic, and there is room for hope in the title song, which suggests that something “shines” within each of us that transcends the dark. Shine may not be Joni Mitchell's very best work, but it is an album of great beauty and power. For me, listening to it inspired a rewarding trip through her extensive back catalog, from 1970's incomparable Ladies of the Canyon to 2002's lush retrospective Travelogue. If you feel similarly inspired, you'll have no trouble at all finding nearly all of her many albums across CMPL's three locations.
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