Turbulent 'Tiger' Just Can't Burn Bright

TAMING THE TIGER

Joni Mitchell

Reprise Records

Since the release of her last album, the Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo, Joni Mitchell's life has been anything but quiet. She divorced her husband and longtime producer Larry Klein and was reunited with her long-lost daughter, whom she had given up for adoption in the early '60s. Yet on her new, unsatisfying album Taming the Tiger, she seems unable to explore these fields of pain and affection. When she meditates on issues of loss and redemption in the song "Man From Mars," for instance, she doesn't delve at all into this tumult of her recent times. Instead, she talks about her cat. While her cat (painted by Mitchell on the album art) does inspire a certain poignancy--as Mitchell earnestly describes it, a "big boo-hoo"--one wonders why she is hiding behind easy words, insubstantial synthesized sounds and--worst of all--lukewarm emotions.

For a brief moment in the '70s, Joni Mitchell produced a series of remarkable album self-portraits. They spoke with serious and playful poetry about her various loves, her life as a celebrity and her thoughts on society in general. With a palette of jazz-inflected colors and wide, icy lyrics, Mitchell wrote incisive melodies and illuminated phrases that stuck in the mind like rare sunshine. The albums of this period, like Court and Spark or The Hissing of Summer Lawns, were exquisitely composed for midnight listening sessions with intimate friends. Reveling in Joni's sexy jazz piano chords and perfect words, one could spend hours with her tender truth that we are all "caught in the struggle for higher positions and the search for love that sticks around."

Unfortunately, nothing on her new album comes close to this honesty and originality. Instead, as in much of her recent work, Mitchell writes trite stories of unconvincing relationships and reserves her passion to bemoan the corruption of society. All this isn't so much unpleasant as just plain flimsy. The best she can muster, for example, to explain societal degradation is to insist simplistically that "lawyers and loan sharks/are laying America to waste." There are small pleasures to be had on Taming the Tiger, like Mitchell's confidently unconventional melodies, her dark and smoke-ravaged voice and the occasional appearances of deft saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Still, one can't help but wonder what happened to Joni Mitchell since we lost her 20 years ago. On Taming the Tiger, at least, she is nowhere to be found.