What should I write about? Where was the life that would give me the energy necessary for writing?

Translated from Norwegian by Pat Coughlin. View PDF for original article.

She gave birth in secret and gave up the child. Now, the music icon Joni Mitchell (64) hopes to win back her daughter.

It has been ten years since she packed her bags and left. Back to her little stone cabin in British Columbia, by the sea.

This is where she came when she disappeared the first time, in 1971 while she was on top, when everyone wanted her. Away from large stages, touring and demanding record companies. Away from fans and journalists.

Away from her exposed self.

"I wish I had a river I could skate away on," she wrote.

She smiles carefully. Picks up the lighter. Lights her cigarette. Her little dog Coco is falling asleep in front of the fireplace.

"It's been a difficult life to navigate," says Joni Mitchell. "But I've learned a few tricks along the way."

SHE IS BACK in Los Angeles, where she lives in a house on a hill, some hundred metres from the Bel Aire Hotel where she blithely welcomes us as the door opens. It has been many years since this Canadian artist has found it worth her while to give interviews, but now she's talking again, and has obviously prepared for this Norwegian visit.

"Just the other day I ran into one of my father's cousin at the shop. My father's last name is Anderson, written with 'on' instead of 'en', which I understand is the Norwegian way to write it? My father's grandparents emigrated from Norway. For some reason, their names were changed on Ellis Island. Where I come from, one doesn't admit to having any Indian blood, so my father has never wanted to talk about this. But my aunt told me everything. When I met my father's cousin at the shop, I took the opportunity. "Do we have Sámi blood in our veins?" I asked. "Oh yes. We are Laplanders*," she said.

Joni Mitchell laughs. She has Swedish ancestors too:

"On my mother's side. They were Vikings and fought their way to the Shetland Islands in the 10th century. "

It is almost 40 years since Mitchell appeared with her guitar among the rockers of Laurel Canyon. She was the incarnation of 'the Beach Boys' girl'. She was John Lennon, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and the California dreaming lady in one unbeatable package.

The voice said even more than the words she sang. She gets up, dressed in black from top to toe. A 64-year-old diva straightens her hat and asks: "Do you think I look Norwegian or Swedish?" "Ah... Norwegian maybe?"

"Good! My father always said that Swedes are like Norwegians. The only difference is that their brains have blown away. Or was that the other way around?" She laughs again. "I have to find out about this before all the old folks die."

THE GIRL SURROUNDED BY SMOKE: Smoking cigarettes daily for over 50 years is said to have given Joni her distinctive voice.

A RAPID RETROSPECT: Roberta Joan Anderson was born in a small town on the Canadian prairie, the only child of Myrtle, a teacher, and Bill, an officer and shopkeeper. Nine years old, she came down with polio. She survived, but spent a long time lying in a hospital. To pass the time, she established a couple good habits and one bad one: painting, singing and smoking. She decided never to stop doing any of these. Her father gets a new job in Saskatoon, the family moves and Joni rapidly becomes the artist of her class.

She buys a ukulele for savings of 36 dollars. She composes songs, gives her first performances, moves to Calgary to attend art school, falls in love for the first time.

And then something happens that will affect the rest of her life: "I got pregnant." She lights another cigarette.

"I had to hide it from my parents. I dreamed up stories. It was a difficult time. When I had the child, everything got even worse. I had no money and had to send her to a foster home."

This happened in 1965, the same year that the artist Chuck Mitchell came to town to hold a concert.

"I tried to get jobs at the time, I wanted to get established. But it was tough to do this in Canada. Chuck arranged a job for me on the other side of the border. At a certain point, I confided in him and told him of my situation. He insisted on marrying me. I was weak and said yes."

On the way down the church aisle, she had one thought in her head: "I can get out of this".

She shrugs her shoulders. "We got married for all the wrong reasons," she says. They ended up in Detroit. Joni and Chuck, a known local duo. "It was a disaster."

TWO YEARS LATER. Joni still had no manager. But she's stubborn, believes in what she is doing. New states, new towns, new bars. 300 concerts a year. The same songs, over and over again.

Just a little more now and she can return to Canada with the economic basis she needs. Back to the shop job, back to the department store to sell women's clothing, let music be a hobby. She's tired. It has been too much, she wants to go home. One of the last nights, in a bar in Florida, David Cosby from The Byrds is standing in front of the stage. He can scarcely believe his ears. For a voice! For some melodies! What texts! He calls the record company.

Joni packs her bags.

So come Song to a Seagull and Clouds .

So come the Grammys.

So comes the summer of 1969.

Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Young.

Laurel Canyon.

Joni and Graham Nash become the new super couple. Their house becomes the centre of the new music scene in Los Angeles. Joni continues to tour. She plays at increasingly larger places. Becomes more and more popular. TV shows, interviews, fans, concerts.

And then it just doesn't work any longer.

"I didn't like the large arenas. I didn't like to talk to the press. I found the self-promoting aspect of my work repugnant. The public was at times... bothersome. I began to dislike what I was doing. It didn't feel fresh any longer. When all the others began to use electric guitars, I was an anachronism. A strange survivor. A dinosaur."

Joni runs away. From everything.

She builds her stone cabin. A window here. A door there. Sits down, alone in the middle of nature.

Back again, a year later, she tries new directions, finds new ways in jazz. Begins to work with Miles Davis' old musicians, the greatest of all. Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus. Then come the 80s, the cold 80s, and the even colder 90s. Musicians love her, but the critics are lukewarm. Her old public loses interest. Where did the old Joni go? Where is Woodstock Joni? The record company wants to push her in new directions.

Joni won't do it.

It stops once again in 1997,

"I couldn't write any longer. So I went back to my old job, painting. That was just as good. I have in any case always seen myself as a painter. And there were other things in my life that were more important than the music. It cost me nothing to stop. It really didn't."

Back to the stone cabin. Out in nature.

This time it takes 10 years.

The album is called Shine and is released through Starbuck's own record company, something that for everyone else would have qualified for the term: "sell-out", but in Joni's case, it is considered to be the complete opposite. She gave the finger to the recording industry. The critics are on her side.

"The best thing David Crosby did for me as a producer for the first album was to pretend that he was doing something. In reality, he did nothing except protect me from interference. Since then I have never had producers. As a painter you cannot doubt yourself. No one stands behind you and tells you where to place the next brushstroke. This is how I have wanted to make my music as well."

The open chords - suspended chords - were nothing new. But Joni didn't use them only once in awhile. She used them all the time.

She hardly used anything else.

"The chords had something unresolved about them. There was a dissonance there, they had a question in them. I didn't know that they had a separate name at the time. But I liked them. They were in style with how I was feeling.

Born with the moon in cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to
Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
Call her green for the Children who've made her
Little Green, be a gypsy dancer

THE SONG is found on what is perhaps her most personal album, Blue from 1971. She sang about it but never talked about it. The story of the daughter she had given up for adoption was one she kept to herself. Until they found their way back to each other ten years ago.

'Little Green' was given the name Kilauren Gibb and two small children. One Canadian had found her real mama. Two children got a new grandmother.

Things fell into place. They were a little family now.

Who were to get to know each other.

"How is your relationship today?"

"It's ... difficult."

Joni lights another cigarette.

"She reminds me a bit of my mother, who never could see me as something other than someone who had stopped taking piano lessons. Who never managed to see that I had found another way. Who never managed to adjust old interpretations."

Coco, the dog, awakes. Crawls up in her mistress' lap.

"What should I have done? I had no money. I had no place to live. There was a snowstorm out there. Should I have taken her with me into the storm? Where would I then have gone? Where would we have got money? I didn't do it for my own sake. I didn't do it for my parents' sake. It wasn't a selfish action. It ripped me to pieces for years. It still eats away at the relationship. I don't know how we will find our way back to each other. What should I say? Yes, we have problems. All families have problems. We are working on them."

JONI LIVES ALONE. In a house in Beverley Hills, among the rich and successful. For the most part, she keeps to herself. Sometimes she takes a trip to her regular cafés and restaurants; places where she is left in peace; places where she is allowed to smoke her cigarettes.

Every Sunday she invites people over.

Performers, artists, friends and acquaintances. Young and old. People she likes.

"I like being alone. I don't need a man to define myself, as I did when I was younger," she says.

She knows she can be difficult to live with.

"It's not easy for men to live with a woman who has an active career. It makes them very ambitious. And in my case, they also have to put up with being called Mr. Mitchell," she laughs. "Not all the Mr. Mitchells have seen the humour of it."

"I leave a relationship when I see that it is no longer good for the person I'm with. I cannot be with someone I'm harming or who harm themselves because they cannot be with me. Nor can I change. Besides...," she says.

A silent grin conquers her face.

"If I had married them, I would have been twice widowed by now."

MADONNA, PRINCE, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Morrisey. It isn't just young girls with guitars around their necks who think of her every once in awhile - Joni Mitchell stood there, like a foundation pile in the history of music.

"You have said that Bob Dylan greatly influenced you in the beginning of your career. In what way?"

"In terms of music, Miles Davis was my greatest inspiration. When I heard Bob for the first time, I wondered what all the fuss was about. In my eyes, he was no original. He was a Woody Guthrie copy. But then he did come up with some good things. I can't quite remember our first meeting, but his influence on me is due solely to 'Positively 4th Street'. The moment I heard the song, I was a fan. If you can write about this, I thought, you can write about anything."

Both Dylan and Mitchell were key figures in the environment around Chelsea Hotel in New York.

"About our purely personal relationship, no... I won't talk about that. It has been very strange."

Leonard Cohen also lived at the legendary hotel.

"I hadn't read so much fiction at that time. At a point I told Leonard that I wanted to do so and he gave me his book list. The more I read, the more I discovered how much both Bob and Leonard had stolen from other poets. It was disillusioning. They cheated! I remember Leonard told me: "Joni, you don't need to read. You write well without it. Reading can have a bad influence."

She laughs, resignedly.

"I was horrified to find out that my heroes cheated. 'Everyone steals,' they said. But why? I had no need to plant my flag in a place that was already full of flags."

GREEN FLAG SONG is the name of her latest project, a photo exhibition that has just been shown in Los Angeles and New York. It's photographs of Joni Mitchell's broken TV which one day began to show images in green and pink, in negative. War, environmental havoc, hunger. Reality stars, the Oscars.

Our sick planet. Humanity.

"We're pissing where we eat. Haven't we learned? That someone is still talking about getting out of this mess using technology is absurd. Unfortunately, there isn't much intelligence left on earth, now that we need it most."

One of the songs on Shine is about the mountain up there, in British Columbia.

"An English company wanted to blow it to pieces to make gravel for the building industry in California. At the same time they write about 'beautiful British Columbia' in the tourist brochures. Pretty soon there will be no more wilderness left in the world. How can this happen? How loud must we shout?"

Darkness has descended on Los Angeles.

Joni Mitchell shakes her head. She gets up, not waiting for an answer. She wonders if I am satisfied now. If I have enough to write about.

For most people, it will soon be time for bed.

For Joni, it's different. She is a night person. Sleeps while the sun is up. Awake with the moon. Paints often until dawn arrives.

Now she wants to get started.

I say thank you for the interview.

As I go to call a taxi, all of a sudden she's there again.

"Want a ride?"

SO OFF WE GO, on broad four-lane highways. The dog. Joni from Saskatoon. A bottle of Pepsi. A banana. A journalist.

I ask her if she has begun to write new songs. If she has begun to think about a new album.

She answers that she doesn't think about it now, not for the moment. There is so much else going on.

She has to give it a winter, at least.

But more will come. She's quite sure that more will come.

She's quiet again. Looks at the road, at the traffic coming towards us.

"That's human nature," she says. "It's a weakness. But when your guard is down, when you feel tortured by life, then there is contact with something, something you don't know quite what is. Something that is larger than yourself."

She looks away.

"We are stardust, we are golden," she quotes from 'Woodstock' - the song that paved the way for a new generation.

The dissonance in the chords is still there.

---

FACTS

Joni Mitchell (born: Roberta Joan Anderson).

Date and place of birth: 7 November 1943 at Macleod, Alberta, Canada

Career: One of the most influential artists of our age. Has released 21 albums and received 5 ordinary Grammys. The first album, Song to a Seagull, was released in 1968. The last, Shine, was released in the autumn of 2007. Her most sold album is Blue from 1971. Among her greatest hits are 'Big Yellow Taxi' from the album Ladies of the Canyon (1970). A number of artists have sung versions of her songs, among them Bob Dylan (Dylan, 1973). Mitchell herself has recorded a new version on her latest album. In parallel with the release of her albums, Mitchell has also had an extensive career as a painter.

Family: One daughter, 42 years of age. Two grandchildren.

In ten years time: "I don't think that far ahead. But I do believe I can continue to grow as an artist, in both painting and music. My mother lived to be over 90 years old. My father is 95 and still alive. I have good genes. I hope I have 20-30 more active years ahead of me."

Who will you vote for: "Who will clean up in this country? There aren't many choices. There are things I like about all the presidential candidates, but none of them are perfect. You know, just by standing as a candidate in this country, your hands are already dirty. So this is difficult to answer."

Member of: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada. Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.

What provokes you: "My own species. How it lives on this planet. It pisses where eats. I am provoked by this insane pride in technology. Haven't we learned? That anyone still talks about getting out of this mess with the help of technology is absurd. Unfortunately there isn't much intelligence left on the earth now that we need it the most."

Who do you admire: Nietzsche and Picasso.

Favourite programme: During my photo project, Green Flag Song, I've watched just about everything possible. It began by accident. I am not particularly technically inclined. One evening I turned on the TV and everything was in negative, with just green and pink colours. I took up a camera and began to take photos. War, revolutions, film stars, everything. So lately I haven't seen much TV in the normal sense."

* Note from the translator: Lapplander is an archaic term, considered derogatory today - a person would say they are Sámi, or that they belong to the Sámi people. It belongs to an emigrant vocabulary, though, and is appropriate without being taken as derogatory.