You can fly too, It's Down to You, It All Comes Down To You." Undoubtedly, these black wings belong to Desire and Death both, confirming that during all of our lives ("Between the forceps and the stone", Hejira, 1977), we do nothing but struggling between Eros and Thanet, with the desperation of knowing, from the very beginning of the game, who the ultimate winner must be.

Joni Mitchell completes the cycle of her recording work in the studio over the next two decades -the 1990s and the 2000s-, with two albums of covers (Both Sides Now and Travelogue). Then finally in 2007 with the release of Shine, her last album of original compositions to date. These two decades make her fully regain her audience's favors and the respect of the critics (the artist obviously not caring one bit about the latter, needless to say…), diving back into her origins as a "Storyteller Of The Soul", while simultaneously engaging in increasingly sharp and uncompromising social observations, and persevering in invention and excellence on a musical as well as a lyrical level.

Joni Mitchell opens the decade of the 1990s with one of her most beautiful and wonderful albums, Night Ride Home. This is the album of a blossomed maturity and the culmination of a fruitful collaboration with her husband, the musician Larry Klein. Joni Mitchell has never been so peacefully beautiful, her music as full and her words as assumed, fair, efficient and moving.

In this album, her writing is fair, sober and quite moving. "I am not old, I'm told, but I am not young, and nothing can be done" (from Nothing Can Be Done in Night Ride Home - 1991). It tells us much about the honesty of someone who always saw things as they were.

These limpid and blunt statement says it all of a woman who, two decades earlier, was already solemnly concerned by "ageing gracefully and with dignity". Coming to this crossroads of age, it is once again with a talent like no other, that Joni Mitchell with Night Ride Home reflects on her life in a series of ten pieces each more beautiful than the other.

I shall point out with this list, what specifically may be the synthesis of everything that Joni Mitchell has written. This is a composition which particularly moves me, its words as the music : Come In From The Cold expresses all the motivations, cracks, enthusiasms and doubts of the artist as well as of the woman, establishing once and for all why she did what she did, and why she is who she is. This composition destroys all the clichés bestowed on her, good or bad, confirming the simple and clairvoyant human being whom she is -a bright, fragile and poignant woman-, and demonstrating the great artist that she always proved to be. A unique, unpredictable and uncompromising musician and writer -and a "painter derailed by circumstance", as Mitchell once described herself.

Night Ride Home will be followed by Turbulent Indigo (1994), a more cerebral, dark and disillusioned album but also quite interesting and brilliant (and this time welcomed by the profession with two Grammy Awards), with tracks like Sex Kills, The Magdelene Laudries and The Sire of Sorrow /Job's Sad Song. Three examples reaching the heights of her most accomplished work. Then with Taming the Tiger (1998), Joni Mitchell seems to want to bow out smoothly -but still by the main door-, with more discreet but still exceptionally creative and moving pieces (Taming the Tiger, Stay in touch, Face Lift, or the melancholic Man From Mars).