If you're still stuck with the notion that Joni Mitchell is a 60's Folk Singer and spokeswoman for the hippy movement and you haven't listened to anything beyond Blue then you need to think again. As the singer has gone through life, and got older, so has her music, so that you see in Joni Mitchell's discography a journey through life as fascinating as it is artistically brilliant.

What turns me on about her later music in particular is the originality of the melody coupled with lyrics which are engaging and interesting. She's not the sort of person to churn stuff out. If she's going to put out an album, it's coming out for a reason. She'll have something she wants to say, and she'll have packed into the album a lot of creativity.

Night Ride Home isn't a particularly celebrated album and yet it's probably the album which I listen to the most. All the songs are so beautiful and easy to listen to yet carry with them the message of a woman looking at the world and finding it wanting. It's not as "in your face" as her next album, Turbulent Indigo, but instead uses its melodies to deliver its message to you in a sweeter more gentle fashion.

Joni's albums are evocative and, I believe, themed. With Night Ride Home you can imagine yourself driving home, alone, through the canadian countryside, contrasting in your own mind the beauty of the landscape and simple elegance of its indigenous people with the furore of the civilisation you've just left behind.

I am not some stone commission
Like a statue in a park
I am flesh and blood and vision
I am howling in the dark
Long blue shadows of the jackals
Are falling on a pay phone by the road
Oh all they ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold

There's so much more I could quote.

Richard