Album: “Shine” by Joni Mitchell (2007) part 1

This place

Sparkle on the ocean
Eagle at the top of a tree
Those crazy crows always making a commotion
This land is home to me.

I was talking to my neighbour
He said, "When I get to heaven, if it is not like this,
I'll just hop a cloud and I'm coming right back down here
Back to this heavenly bliss."

You see those lovely hills
They won't be there for long
They're gonna tear 'em down
And sell them to California
Here come the toxic spills
Miners poking all around
When this place looks like a moonscape
Don't say I didn't warn ya...

Money, money, money...
Money makes the trees come down
It makes mountains into molehills
Big money kicks the wide wide world around.

Black bear in the orchard
At night he's in my garbage cans
He's getting so bold but no one wants to shoot him
He's got a right to roam this land.

I feel like Geronimo
I used to be as trusting as Cochise
But the white eyes lies
He's out of whack with nature
And look how far his weapons reach!

Spirit of the water
Give us all the courage and the grace
To make genius of this tragedy unfolding
The genius to save this place.

An awareness for the fate of home nature (beautiful like-heaven landscapes are destined to be eradicated for strip mining, or conversion into building land) by an over-development driven by money and greed. Great song and album by the performer of one of our favourite eco-songs “Big Yellow Taxi”. This song is also included in this album in a more dark version, expressing Mitchell’s disappointment about Nature’s maltreatment all these years after its original release in 1970. Joni Mitchell stated: this song is inspired when they decided to whittle down this mountain behind my sanctuary and sell it to California as gravel for McMansions


Bad Dreams

The cats are in the flower bed
A red hawk rides the sky
I guess I should be happy
Just to be alive...
But we have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls
While condors fall from Indian skies
Whales beach and die in sand...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.

You cannot be trusted
Do you even know you're lying
It's dangerous to kid yourself
You go deaf and dumb and blind.
You take with such entitlement.
You give bad attitude.
You have no grace
No empathy
No gratitude

You have no sense of consequence
Oh my head is in my hands...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.

Before that altering apple
We were one with everything
No sense of self and other
No self-consciousness.
But now we have to grapple
With our man-made world backfiring
Keeping one eye on our brother's deadly selfishness.

And everyone's a victim!
Nobody's hands are clean.
There's so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.
We live in these electric scabs.
These lesions once were lakes.
No one knows how to shoulder the blame
Or learn from past mistakes...
So who will come to save the day?
Mighty Mouse?
Superman?
Bad dreams are good in the great plan.


Pollution threatens humans, animal life and landscapes, but nobody seems to care, about our future, about our mistakes in the past,...


Strong and wrong

Strong and wrong you win--
Only because
That's the way its always been.
Men love war!
That's what history' s for.
History...
A mass--murder mystery...
His story

Strong and wrong
You lose everything
Without the heart
You need
To hear a robin sing
Where have all the songbirds gone?
Gone!
All I hear are crows in flight
Singing might is right
Might is right!

Oh the dawn of man comes slow
Thousands of years
And here we are...
Still worshiping
Our own ego

Strong and wrong
What is God's will?
Onward Christian soldiers...
Or thou shall not kill...
Men love war!
Is that what God is for?
Just a Rabbit's foot?
Just a lucky paw
For shock and awe?
Shock and awe!

The dawn of man comes slow
Thousands of years
Here we are
Still worshiping
Our own ego
Strong and Wrong!
Strong and Wrong!

Worship of power, domination, war and violence are mainly masculine traits, imposed by patrist cultures and spread all over the world. History is full of masculine war narrations by putting aside feminine peaceful ones.

You can hear songs from this album in youtube:

This place
Big Yellow Taxi (remake)
Bad Dreams