"Oh I am not old / I'm told / But I am not young," Joni Mitchell sings in "Nothing Can Be Done," from her new album, "Night Ride Home." The song, which has lyrics by the 47-year old singer-songwriter and music by her 34-year-old husband, Larry Klein, addresses a subject that is virtually taboo in the youth obsessed world of pop music—middle-age resignation.

"Must I surrender with grace/ The things that I loved when I was younger?" she asks. "What do I do here with this hunger?" Ms. Mitchell's stoic reply to her own question, repeated almost like a mantra throughout the song, is simply: "Nothing can be done."

"I'm 47, and I guess I've come through my middle-age crazies, which are as predictable as the terrible twos,'" Ms. Mitchell reflected in a recent interview from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband of eight years. (She met Mr. Klein, a bassist and producer, while working on her 1982 album "Wild Things Run Fast.")

"You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart. You've got to get through this lament for what was. The song was based partly on 'The Desiderata,' which says, 'Surrender gracefully the things of youth.' When I play the song for my middle aged friends, they either won't look at it or they look at it and weep."

The new album (Geffen GEFD 23402; all three formats), with its wistful backward gazes and twinges of longing for new adventure, is serene compared to Ms. Mitchell's 1970's albums, "Blue," "For the Roses," "Court and Spark" and "Hejira." Her confessional lyrics on those recordings set the standards for personal honesty and poetic grace in what was labeled the singer-songwriter genre.

When that genre fell out of fashion at the end of the decade, Ms. Mitchell explored other musical realms, and her album sales dipped from more than a million to under 500,000.

Indeed, her musical innovations remain undervalued. In 1979, six years before Sting began exploring jazz instrumentation in mainstream pop, Ms. Mitchell collaborated with the late jazz composer Charles Mingus. The following year she released a concert album, "Shadows of Light," featuring such eminent young jazz players as Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker and Jaco Pastorius. A decade before Paul Simon's African pop album "Graceland," Ms. Mitchell had recorded "The Jungle Line," a song for voice and percussion made with the warrior drums of Burundi.

The 1980's found her experimenting with cinematic textures and scenarios. The political album "Dog Eat Dog" (1985) featured Rod Steiger on one cut portraying a Jimmy Swaggart-like television evangelist. Characters also appeared in some of the aural collages on "Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm" (1988), which editorialized against the materialistic values of that decade.

Like most of her peers, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joan Baez and Crosby, Stills and Nash, Ms. Mitchell is still signed to a major label but is no longer a best-selling artist. At the same time, she is an avidly admired cult figure. Prince, of all people, has cited her as a major influence. For the last several years, the performance artist John Kelly has been doing an eerie, worshipful impersonation of Ms. Mitchell as a brooding, flaxen-haired ingenue. "The Joni Mitchell Project" - a revue of her songs with a format similar to that of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris"—won critical acclaim last November at the Los Angeles Theater Center. It played for three months, and is scheduled to open in the fall at the Berkeley Repertory Theater.

"Night Ride Home," Ms. Mitchell's 16th album, is also a kind of retrospective. With its spare, ringing guitar textures and introspective lyrics, it is closer in spirit to her 70's albums than anything she has released in more than a decade. But where the songs on her confessional masterpieces of the 70's were scorched with erotic passion and yearnings, "Night Ride Home" takes a longer, cooler view of life and love. Its songs jump back and forth in time to form a sort of dialogue that Ms. Mitchell describes as taking place "between the present, my youth and the year zero in the Christian calendar."

The most farsighted number is her reworking of William Butler Yeats's "Second Coming," which she has retitled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," in acknowledgment, she says, of the Joan Didion essay. Although most of the lines have been changed slightly to make the words sit comfortably with Ms. Mitchell's flowing folk-pop melody, the song remains essentially true to the poem's spirit and tone. The most significant adjustment was to alter Yeats's lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Her adaptation reads: "The best lack conviction/ Given some time to think/ And the worst are full of passion/ Without mercy."

Ms. Mitchell changed it because "l kept thinking where the reverse applied. I couldn't see passion as a bad thing."

The album's most open-hearted songs reminisce about childhood and adolescence. "Cherokee Louise" describes the plight of a childhood friend who is sexually abused by her foster father and hides in a railway tunnel. In "Come In From the Cold," whose seductive Latin beat echoes 60's hits like "Save the Last Dance for Me," Ms. Mitchell looks back to her adolescence in the sexually repressed 50's, when "we had to dance, a foot apart, and they hawk-eyed us from the sidelines."

In a lyric that moves forward from the late 50's, the singer describes a change of personal philosophy from one of romantic idealism ('We had hope/ The world held promise") to deep skepticism ("But then absurdity came over me/ And I longed to lose control").

Joni Mitchell—the woman who exalted the hippie culture of 20 years ago in the counter-cultural anthem "Woodstock"—is not especially sentimental about the 60's. One night recently, at a post-concert dinner party at which she, Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Don Henley shared a table, a young man approached and started waxing romantic about the 60's

"I told him, 'Don't be romantic about it—we failed," she recalled. "And he said, 'Well, at least you tried.' And I said, 'But we didn't try hard enough. We didn't learn from history. If any progress is to be made, we must show you how we failed.'"

In tracing her own artistic growth in the past 20 years, Ms. Mitchell uses metaphors drawn from American Indian mythology, in which the four points of the compass represent different ways of perceiving the world.

"At the time of 'Blue,' I was very west, which is emotion, and as a result I couldn't communicate with the northeast, which is more rational and business oriented," she said. "I had no defenses. I would look at the business people and burst into tears. They had to lock me up to make that record. There's a purity in "Blue" that comes from an almost-nothing-left-to-lose attitude. After that I had to grow some claws to survive, which means I had to develop my northeast and become more emotionally detached."

Ms. Mitchell has also developed a second career as a painter and has exhibited in Europe and Japan. Because she has no formal musical training, she often employs a visual artist's vocabulary when talking about music.

"I know none of the numerics of music," she explained. "I see music as fluid architecture. For me, the chords are colors that you stir into mutant shades, as in painting."

The sounds that have had the greatest impact on her, she said, have come from every corner of the musical map.

"The first record I ever bought was the theme from the movie 'The Story Of Three Loves,' the 18th variation from Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. I flipped for it. The second was Edith Piaf singing 'The Three Bells.' My major influence as a singer was Edith Piaf.

"I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it," she continued. "You could play for three months and become a professional. In high school I was always writing poetry, but I never thought that poetry and song could be the same thing until Bob Dylan came along. The song that did it for me was Positively Fourth Street.' I owe much to Bobby for that."

Even though "Night Ride Home" has garnered more critical praise than any album Ms. Mitchell has released in years, she does not expect it to bring back the kind of mass adulation she enjoyed in the 1970's. Nor does she desire that kind of fame.

"I had a flirtation with the big roar at one point," she said. "And I didn't like getting to a place where my audience was bigger than those who understood what I was saying."

"The question now is whether people can enjoy the singing of a middle-aged woman, even though the consensus is that if you don't evoke your dreams, you're in trouble. Would they truly enjoy it more if my jawline were tighter? My husband is younger than me, and he's not afraid of the wrinkles or the natural sagging of my jawline. What I'd like to do is experiment and create roles for myself. Maybe I could become a character singer like Willie Nelson."