Singer Joni Mitchell, who came back to Vancouver to promote her new album, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, was greeted by rain.

"So, whaddaya wanna know?" Joni Mitchell demands, as she sits down to another press conference in another city.

Like the others, this city wants to know about her new album, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, and about Joni Mitchell.

Outside, there is a Vancouver-brand rainstorm to order. It seems to have drawn the media and Mitchell closer together.

Dressed in shades of green, draped in silversmith jewelry, a black pork-pie hat rammed over her blonde hair, Mitchell manages to be both glamorous and ingenuous. The only hint of nervousness or compulsiveness is the stub count she racks up on two packs of Camels.

"It was really nostalgic," she says of the promo tour, which took her back to her home town of Saskatoon.

Yes, she still has her place on the Sunshine Coast. No, she has no immediate plans to tour, despite the warm response to the new LP.

Yes, her working with the late Charles Mingus has continued to influence her records. No, there is no effort on her part to change direction with each LP. "It's just my pattern of the moment."

Her pattern, she admits, has been affected by her marriage to Larry Klein, with whom she co-produced the new LP.

Thirteen years her junior and an in-demand musician, Klein has been to England to produce Benjamin Orr's solo LP and to record with Peter Gabriel. Mitchell, traveling and creating with Klein, met Gabriel and Orr as well as Gabriel's superb drummer, Manu Katche.

These musicians, as well as Billy Idol, Steve Stevens, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Wayne Shorter and others lent their services to Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm on "the barter system." The way it worked, for example, Klein played on Gabriel's So, so Gabriel let her use his studio in the country and recommended Katche.

Her experiences during the 2½ years of making Chalk Mark on the fly contributed to some of its themes  global water shortage (addressed in an update of the Sons of the Pioneers' Cool Water, which is a duet with Willie Nelson), Indian land claims (Lakota), and the imminence of war (The Beat of Black Wings).

It is not, she admits, as outspoken as the previous Dog Eat Dog.

"My last LP was a political awakening," Mitchell says now. Previously she had believed that politics and music didn't mix.

In acknowledging that pop music had "lost its place" as a vehicle for social change, she also was moved to write songs about the hypocrisy of TV evangelism (on the last LP) or the helplessness of the individual in the face of world conflict on the new one.

"It's not so hard-hitting, not so emphatic," Mitchell describes Chalk Mark, whose title is the key line from The Beat of Black Wings. "I felt like Paul Revere on the last record."

This change in her narrative approach to writing  from songs that examined her own emotions to ones that measure those of characters she creates  has, in part, been influenced by marriage.

"Now that I'm married that where-can-my-true-love-be theme is out of the way," she jokes. "And Larry and I really get along so that takes care of heartbreak songs. I guess I'm on the brink of maturity, too."

At the suggestion that her achievement of the status of pop icon has given her freedom from the everyday and more mundane, constraints of the struggling artist, Mitchell appeared uncomfortable but was appropriately modest.

Still, her reply indicated that she doesn't like to be taken for granted at Geffen Records, despite the freedom the company gives her.

"I'm like a figurehead over there," Mitchell says. "They don't care if I sell records. They may not sell a lot right out of the chute but they break even over time.

"I'm like Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, always on the shelves."