"A Tribute to Joni Mitchell"
Various Artists
(Nonesuch)

Tribute albums are notoriously tricky. Measuring up to an artist worthy of homage is one thing. Tribute discs are also often designed around a particular label's roster, so hit-making status or promotional considerations can determine who sings what tune as much as any affinity for the material. And some artists are oddly inimitable.

Joni Mitchell's songs often seem to resist the touch of others, the sophisticated chords and jazzy rhythm of the vocal lines almost as personal as the densely poetic lyrics. Although Bob Dylan is an individualist's individualist, there are myriad Dylan covers worth hearing; there are relatively few enduring interpretations of Mitchell's songs, notwithstanding Judy Collins' 1968 hit with "Both Sides Now" and the defining version of "Woodstock" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

"A Tribute to Joni Mitchell" aimed to rectify this at a stroke. Initially a Warner Bros. project, the album languished due to corporate shifts, with artier associated label Nonesuch finally picking it up. Several tracks are previously released '90s material -- B-sides by Annie Lennox (a bland, dated "Ladies of the Canyon") and Sarah McLachlan (an overwrought "Blue"), plus a too-sweet version of "River" from a James Taylor Christmas album.

On record as a Mitchell devotee, Prince offers a one-man-band cover of "A Case of You." His account is disappointingly bloodless, though, with its hotel-bar piano and multi-tracked falsetto; only the coda's funky fade hints at what might've been. Far more compelling is Cassandra Wilson's stark take on "For the Roses," which she makes her own with chanteuse intensity, woody double-bass resonating behind.

Bjork remakes "The Boho Dance" in her own avant-pop image, too, the tinkling celeste and off-kilter vocal making the song sound like a poem beamed from another planet. A far straighter affair is "Help Me" by k.d. lang, no stranger to her fellow Canadian's material. Her voice can't fly like Mitchell's in her heyday, but lang invests the songwriter's poppiest, sexiest number with an appealing warmth.

The lineup's newest artist is homebrewed-pop auteur Sufjan Stevens, although the ornate feyness of his "Free Man in Paris" is for fans only. Caetano Veloso's Brazilian take on "Dreamland" sounds as foreign as a polar bear in Rio. And Mitchell's lyrics sound nearly as strange in the mouths of Elvis Costello ("Edith and the Kingpin") and Emmylou Harris ("The Magdalene Laundries"). Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau avoids that trouble with an attractive, wordless rendition of "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow."

The most illuminating remake of a Mitchell song is by the songwriter herself -- of "Both Sides Now," the title track to her 2000 album of the same title (mostly of jazz standards). This version ups the emotional ante to an almost unbearable degree, the orchestral strings aching nostalgia, the phrasing as deep as the words, her voice weathered like a sepia photograph as the older woman sings of love's lessons learned.