In 2002, Joni Mitchell announced her retirement, citing dissatisfaction with the music business (actually, she called it a “cesspool.”) Five years later, Mitchell pulled a Jay-Z and announced that she wasn’t retiring after all, and that she’d signed to Starbucks’ in-house label Hear Music; Shine was the result of this unholy union. It would become Mitchell’s best-selling album since Hejira, no doubt the result of impulse buys by boomers stopping off for a soy mocha latte between spa treatments and key parties. Beginning brazenly with the instrumental “One Week Last Summer,” the serious-sounding album contains songs inspired by Kipling poems and Tennessee Williams plays; Mitchell has never exactly been a madcap, but rarely has she sounded more didactic. Still, even when it is lecturing about deregulated capitalism (it’s bad), war (also bad), and pollution (she still prefer her apples the way nature intended, thank you very much), Shine is proof that Mitchell has lost none of her imagination: Several songs pit a delightfully incongruous pedal steel guitar against chamber jazz atmospheres and Mitchell’s trademark percussive acoustic playing; it’s as if Mitchell had heard her own “No Apologies” from 1998’s Taming The Tiger and concluded, correctly, that her tendency toward musical pluralism is one of her most attractive assets. The zesty “If I Had A Heart” and the rich, spectral title track brim with the old Mitchell magic, while “This Place” may provide the single greatest distillation of Blue and the experiments produced in its wake. Mitchell’s stern social commentary may become grating and tiresome over the course of the album’s 47 minutes, but Shine is rarely dull. Tellingly, the album’s only truly Olympian failure is an unforgivably lame cover of one of her own songs.