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.
Read more about this topic: Shine (Joni Mitchell Album)
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—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
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“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
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