How Starbucks brought Joni Mitchell out of retirement: “They resurrected me”
Most artists tend to draw a line in the sand when they think about bowing out for the final time. There’s no way for anyone to match what they did in their prime, but Joni Mitchell knew that she could get her bearings back again as long as she had the right idea to go along with it.
But listening to the radio in the 2000s, much of what Mitchell had grown up as a composer had slowly slipped away. There weren’t that many singer-songwriters left to go around, and while there was the occasional great pop song that she loved like ‘You Get What You Give’, it’s not like there were any artists like Crosby, Stills, and Nash that were pushing the envelope for what was allowed on the singles charts.
Besides, Mitchell had already gone beyond the traditional methods of having hit singles. She liked the idea of making music based on jazz, and while that didn’t always make for the best-selling records of all time, there was at least a market for it when she teamed up with LA Express back in the day or when she began working with some of the finest players in the world, like Jaco Pastorius. But in the modern age, that was the equivalent of easy-listening music.
It’s not like Mitchell had much else she wanted to give the world, either. She had made her peace with the kind of music she had worked on in the past, and while not everything found the same audience as records like Blue or The Hissing of Summer Lawns did, she still was a major figure in the songwriting world. But right as she started to bow out, the one thing that made her turn her head was listening to what Starbucks was doing around that time.
Despite most of us knowing Starbucks as a much different entity these days, Mitchell was interested in the musical side of their business. There was occasional music there that took a few chances, and since she heard what jazz pianist Diana Krall could have done on Starbucks’ label, Mitchell figured the next best thing was to try her hand at performing her favourite songs she had accumulated over the years.
Looking back, Mitchell would even consider this one of the main reasons why she decided to get back into music, saying, “I didn’t listen to music for years. I would turn on the radio and it felt like crap, but Starbucks had this Artist‘s Choice series going on and my office sent me one Diana Krall did. So I asked if I could do an album containing some of my favourite music. To me, it was life and death in terms of whether I’d ever play music again [and] we developed a relationship. They resurrected me in a way.”
While Shine occasionally comes off like the coffeehouse music that plays inside most Starbucks lobbies, it’s far from a dirge by any means. Outside of the token reworking of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, this was Mitchell learning a new way for her to make music, and even if it was downtempo, it was impossible not to have a pleasant time listening to her voice soaring over the instrumentation of people like Larry Klein and James Taylor.
It’s not going to have the same kind of atmosphere that turned up on Mitchell’s classic records, but it was never designed to be listened to in that way, either. This is the best kind of album to listen to when decompressing after a long day, and while that might make some casual fans’ skin crawl, it’s better to have Mitchell actually enjoying herself making music than retreating back into retirement once again.
