Barney Hoskyns, eMusic.com, November 2007
Joni Mitchell declared in 2002 that she was done with the music biz and would never, ever, make another album. I can’t have been the only fan not to have believed her. For bless her, Dame Joan does love the sound of her own voice.
On the Starbucks-spawned Shine, that nicotine-scorched voice holds forth – as it has done since 1985’s Dog Eat Dog – on the many ills that beset our world, its musical backdrop her favoured spare setting (since 1994’s Turbulent Indigo, anyway) of piano, percussion and twittering soprano sax. Huskily it wails and rails on all the Big Issues: war (‘Strong and Wrong’) and the environment (‘This Place’), more war (‘Bad Dreams’), more environment (‘If I Had a Heart’). Mitchell gazes down from her LA eyrie and likes not what she sees.
Most of the time the spiky self-righteousness is redeemed by the mournful melodicism: there are magical passages on ‘If I Had a Heart’ and ‘Hana’, on ‘Bad Dreams’ and ‘Night of the Iguana’. But the revisiting of the 1970 ecology classic ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ is a mistake and the closing adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’ (with Herbie Hancock on piano) drones on interminably. Joni’s last truly great song may have been ‘Man from Mars’ on 1998’s Taming the Tiger, her last great performance the stunning re-arrangement of ‘Amelia’ on 2002’s Travelogue. Nothing on Shine touches either of those peaks.