In her new best-selling book, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon), Interview's contributing editor Camille Paglia offers a meditation on Joni Mitchell's classic song "Woodstock." Here she talks with the music legend about her new album, Songs of a Prairie Girl (Rhino Records), and the many sources of her inspiration.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Is this Joni?

JONI MITCHELL: This is Joni.

CP: Oh, wow, I'm floored to be speaking to one of the great artists of our time!

JM: So, what should we talk about?

CP: I'm interested in your creative process. You've lived a whole life as an artist in ways that are very inspiring to young people who lack role models today. As a lifelong fan of pop culture, I'm worried about the way it's supplanting artistic experience for young people now.

JM: Well, America has always loved its criminals, but in the last two decades the sediment has truly risen to the top. To me, underbelly cultures are always interesting, but when those subcultures grab the reins and rise to a dominating position, especially in youth-oriented mediums, there are sociological consequences.

CP: Your music often explores the metaphysics of love--the ecstasy and melancholy, the ups and downs. Just a few days ago, I was standing in the plumbing section of Home Depot when your song "Help Me" came over the loudspeaker. It's absolutely gorgeous and has enduring popular appeal. It captures the subtleties and emotional modalities of being in love or out of love. But that kind of complex insight seems gone. Young musicians were once the cutting edge of culture, but no more.

JM: When we started out, it was uncharted waters. I mean, it's not like I grew up playing air guitar in front of my bedroom mirror. Artists were still disreputable. I was a painter and wanted to go to art school, but my parents didn't want me to--to be an artist wasn't respectable. Then the Beatles hit, and suddenly people thought, "There's gold in 'dem hills." I never thought I'd have a record deal. I come from a wheat-farming community where it's the tall poppy formula: Stick your head above the crowd, and they'll be happy to lop it off for you! [Paglia laughs] You weren't encouraged to be exceptional unless it was about getting A's in school--but there's no creativity to that.

CP: This is why your body of work has such quality. You were developing your imagination and your voice before outside commercial pressures began. Now young people instantly covet the recording contract. Unfortunately, the fabulous music-video revolution of the '80s degenerated and turned music into image and posing.

JM: I heard a record executive say on the radio that they were no longer looking for talent but rather for a look and a willingness to cooperate, because with Pro Tools they can fix anything. There's always been a disposable quality to this business.

CP: I've been teaching at art schools for most of my career, and I can clearly see the way the business is short-circuiting young artists' development. They don't have time to percolate.

JM: The reason I did is because the record company didn't value me at all. This was to my advantage. They got me dirt cheap--they didn't know how to market me. I looked like a folk musician because I'd been playing in clubs for several years, which I really enjoyed. You could jump down off that stage, and you were still one of the people--they didn't gasp at the mention of your name. It was comfortable, and you could experiment. Warner Reprise had no money invested in me and therefore left me alone--not out of kindness but out of disinterest.

CP: But wasn't there a tremendous buzz in the music community about your songs?

JM: Actually, other artists would cross the street when I walked by! Initially, I thought that was due to elitism, but I later found out they were intimidated by me. Led Zeppelin was very courageous and outspoken about liking my music, but others wouldn't admit it. My market was women, and for many years the bulk of my audience was black, but straight white males had a problem with my music. They would come up to me and say, "My girlfriend really likes your music," as if they were the wrong demographic.

CP: The musical landscape has changed profoundly. In my commentary on your song "Woodstock," I stress the enormous difference between Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's upbeat hard-rock version and the way you perform it as a moody art song. Their style had the cultural momentum for decades, but I think the hard-rock moment in popular music is over. I'm sad because it was such a huge part of my youth.

JM: I've seen things written about "Woodstock" in university courses on the '60s--they really like to nail me for the naive idealism of it, whereas you were able to get the ironic tone. At that time, I felt so desperately that we were placed here to be the custodians of the planet Eden. So for the first 10 or 20 performances of that song, I used to get a lump in my throat. I felt that the primitives who remained on the planet were still living in harmony with nature, versus us--the supreme white guy, with our scientific monstrosities, playing with half a deck! We need to get a grip on our original destiny and learn to love the wild and save what's left of it and not go paving over farmlands that we may need someday. This is the farmer in me speaking. I'm the first generation of my genealogy off the farm, so it's in my blood to think in terms of good soil and weather. [laughs]

CP: This brings us to your new album, Songs of a Prairie Girl. You come from Central and Western Canada, a great open landscape that has clearly given you vision and perspective.

JM: In looking at the album I found that it's all about winter and wanting to get out of there! [both laugh] The song "Big Yellow Taxi" was inspired by my first trip to Hawaii. I woke up after my first night there, looked out the window, and saw these green mountains and white flying birds and then, down on the ground, a parking lot as far as I could see. When that song was released as a single, it was a hit only in Hawaii at first--it took people in other places a while to realize that their region was paradise and that they were losing it too.

CP: You have such a strong eye for detail, be it for nature or the city or people or colors. It's one of the hallmarks of your writing. Is it because you grew up on the prairie?

JM: Well, I'm a painter, so I tend to think in pictures and store pictorial information, like an autistic person.

CP: You're a superb model for young, aspiring artists because of your vast range: music, literature, and art all melded together.

JM: I'm a Renaissance person in that I express myself in three arts. I work to get them all up to a certain standard through discipline and observation. You have to be self-adjudicating and self-critical.

CP: You also have a gift for improvisation.

JM: Improvisation takes nerve. It requires taking a chance and also failing. You have to overcome fear. My mother was always saying, "You're too sensitive," and "You think too much for a female." That comes under the banner of that generation's "Don't worry your pretty little head about it!" In Plato's utopia, you could not be a poet and a painter and a musician. You had to pick one. CP: Plato felt that poets and artists couldn't be trusted because they questioned authority and religion and therefore were dissidents who would threaten the stability of the ideal state.

JM: Absolutely. I did an album called Dog Eat Dog [1985], which was not well received. It contained headline stories, such as the fall of Jimmy Swaggart.

CP: I know you take the issue of evangelical Christianity very seriously.

JM: I take the marriage of church and state very seriously. On Sunset Boulevard during the Reagan era, there were pink billboards with black letters saying, "Rock 'n' Roll is the Devil," signed by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Reagan was very cozy with him. When I put that album out, the church was watching rock 'n' roll, playing it backwards, looking for diabolical messages. When the album was released, I was challenged to a debate on The 700 Club by Pat Robertson, though I got congratulatory letters from an Episcopalian Church and from the Crystal Cathedral, which really surprised me. They said, "We need more artists like you."

CP: During the George W. Bush administration, the evangelical movement has intensified its cultural pressure in the U.S. There are more and more cable TV channels devoted to religious broadcasting.

JM: Oh, it's very lucrative. It's a nice little business to get into if you're a good rapper.