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Sat 04 Apr 2007Joni returns to face the musicDespite spitting hatred at the music business on her retirement from recording in 2002, Joni Mitchell is back with a new set of songs and a new attitude. She talks to Paul Sexton'I'm an uppity female," says Joni Mitchell, sitting in the kitchen of her house in an upmarket neighbourhood of Los Angeles. "In the media, there's no one like me. I'm as good as - and better than - most. But I'm not given my fair shake." Mitchell's house is big, warm and rustic, very much the abode of a working artist. A large pot of brushes sits out; a giant painting is propped against a wall. She looks healthy and serene, younger than her years, dressed in a casual smock and no- nonsense boots, and laughs readily and infectiously. When Mitchell announced her retirement as a recording artist in 2002, she did so spitting hatred at what the music business had become. She bowed out with Travelogue, an orchestral revisiting of her earlier work, and quietly set about directing her creativity at her surviving passion: visual art. It's hard to reconcile that embittered woman of 58 with the energised, feisty, funny 63-year-old before me now.