Shine is the nineteenth and final studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and was released on September 25, 2007 by Starbucks' Hear Music. (update refers to March 27 BBC broadcast of new songs "six months before her first LP in ten years is released," implying a release date in September) It was the singer-songwriter's first album of new songs in nine years, after 1998's Taming the Tiger.

Joni Mitchell, who said she was retiring from music several years ago, signed a two-album contract with Starbucks' Hear Music that began with the release of Shine. The 10-track CD "feels like the return of Joni the storyteller," said Ken Lombard, the president of Starbucks Entertainment who also oversees Hear Music.

In the United States, the album sold about 40,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number 14 on the Billboard 200 chart;Katie Hasty, , Billboard.com, October 3, 2007. this was Mitchell's best peak position in America since 1976's Hejira. Shine also peaked at #36 in the UK charts, 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 and as of December, 2007, it has sold over 170,000 copies in the U.S.A.Keith Caulfield, , Billboard.com, December 21, 2007.

History

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.

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.'" Though in The New York Times Mitchell said the album's title would either be Strange Birds of Appetite or If, the title Shine was confirmed by her official website on March 15.

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. Mitchell herself described Shine as "as serious a work as I've ever done."

It is only Mitchell's second album not to have been distributed by Warner Music Group at any point in time, the first being Night Ride Home, which was released by ex-WEA affiliate Geffen Records a year after being sold to MCA Inc., which later became Universal Music Group.

Performance

The album was played live with accompanying choreographed ballet dance done by the Alberta Ballet, filmed and shown before an audience on September 25 at the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street, NYC. The backdrop of the ballet featured photographs by Joni Mitchell, taken using a camera pointed at a Sony TV screen, whose image was inverted, producing a green and white image. The photographs were exhibited at the Violet Ray Gallery on the same night as the showing of the film. The cover of Shine features a still image of the dancers in the ballet.

Personnel

*Joni Mitchell - vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards

*Larry Klein - bass

*Greg Leisz - pedal steel guitar

*Brian Blade - drums

*Bob Sheppard - saxophone

*Paulinho Da Costa - percussion on "Hana"

*James Taylor - acoustic guitar on "Shine"

Charts

References

Category:Joni Mitchell albums

Category:2007 albums

Category:Hear Music albums

de:Shine (Album)

fr:Shine (album de Joni Mitchell)

it:Shine (Joni Mitchell)

nn:Shine av Joni Mitchell

Artist/Band Information

Joni Mitchell, CC, (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then busking on the streets of Toronto. In the mid-1960s she left for New York City and its rich folk music scene, recording her debut album in 1968 and achieving fame first as a songwriter ("Urge for Going", "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", "Woodstock") and then as a singer in her own right. Finally settling in Southern California, Mitchell played a key part in the folk rock movement then sweeping the musical landscape. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, is regarded as one of the strongest and most influential records of the time. Mitchell also had pop hits such as "Big Yellow Taxi", "Free Man in Paris", and "Help Me", the last two from 1974's best-selling Court and Spark.

Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones.

Mitchell's work is highly respected both by critics and by fellow musicians. Rolling Stone magazine called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever," while Allmusic said, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century." Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance."Interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in nine years.

Early life

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill Anderson and Myrtle Anderson (née McKee). Her mother was a teacher, and her father an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. During the war years, she moved with her parents to a number of bases in western Canada. After the war, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. When she was eleven years old, the family settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown.

Her mother's ancestors were Scottish and Irish.Irish Times Magazine, p. 14, July 19, 2008 Her father's were Norwegian. Her paternal grandmother was born on the farm Farestveit in Modalen, Hordaland, Norway. Her paternal grandfather was from Sømna, Sør-Helgeland, Nordland, Norway.

At the age of nine, Mitchell contracted polio during a Canadian epidemic, but she recovered after a stay in hospital. Extraordinarily, this was the same polio epidemic (1951) in which singer Neil Young, then aged five, also contracted the virus.George McKay (2009) '. Popular Music 28:3, 341-365. It was during this time that she first became interested in singing. She describes her first experience singing while in hospital during the winter in the following way:

"They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn't go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud ... The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham." She began smoking at the age of nine as well, a habit which is arguably one of the factors contributing to the change in her voice in recent years (Mitchell herself disputes this in several interviews).

As a teenager, Joni taught herself ukulele and, later, guitar. She began performing at parties and bonfires, which eventually led to gigs playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary for a year, during which she made the acquaintance of another budding singer-songwriter, Harry Chapin, but Mitchell then left, telling her mother: "I'm going to Toronto to be a folksinger."

After leaving art college in June 1964, Mitchell left her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto. She found out that she was pregnant by her college ex-boyfriend, and in February 1965 she gave birth to a baby girl. A few weeks after the birth, Joni Anderson married folk-singer Chuck Mitchell, and took his surname. A few weeks later she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably a very specific telling of the story in the 1971 song "Little Green". Mitchell's 1982 song "Chinese Cafe", from the album Wild Things Run Fast, includes the lyrics "Your kids are coming up straight / My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her."

Mitchell's daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult. In 1997 Gibb mentioned her search to the girlfriend of a man with whom she had grown up. By coincidence, this woman knew a third person who had once told her that he knew Joni Mitchell years earlier "when she was pregnant." Mitchell and her daughter were reunited shortly thereafter.

Career

1965–1969: Breakthrough

In the summer of 1965, Chuck Mitchell took Joni with him to the United States. While living in Detroit, Chuck & Joni were regular performers at area coffee houses as well as The Alcove bar near Wayne State University and the "Rathskelter" a restaurant on the campus of the University of Detroit. Oscar Brand featured her several times on his CBC television program Let's Sing Out in 1965 and 1966, broadening her exposure. Mitchell attended school at West Virginia University for short period, which led to her song "Morning Morgantown." The marriage and partnership of Joni and Chuck Mitchell dissolved in early 1967, and Joni moved to New York City to pursue her musical dreams as a solo artist. She played venues up and down the East Coast, including Philadelphia, Boston, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style.

Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability. He took "Urge For Going" to popular folk act Judy Collins but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself. Country singer George Hamilton IV heard Rush performing it and recorded a hit country version. Other artists who recorded Mitchell songs in the early years were Buffy Sainte-Marie ("The Circle Game"), Dave Van Ronk ("Both Sides Now"), and eventually Judy Collins ("Both Sides Now", a top ten hit, included on her 1967 album Wildflowers). Collins also covered "Chelsea Morning", a recording which again eclipsed Mitchell's own commercial success early on.

While she was playing one night in "The Gaslight South", a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. He took her back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends. Crosby convinced a record company to agree to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without all the folk-rock overdubs that were in vogue at the time, and his clout earned him a producer's credit in March 1968, when Reprise Records released her debut album, alternately known as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull.

Mitchell continued touring steadily to promote the LP. The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell's second LP, Clouds, which was released in April 1969. It finally contained Mitchell's own versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists: "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", and "Tin Angel." The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds, were designed and painted by Mitchell, a marriage of her art and music which she would continue throughout her career.

1970–1974: Mainstream success

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