Titled Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced, the project was conceived by Mitchell to be the music to a ballet about love, but after 18 months of song sequencing, she could not condense her work down to a single disc that seemed more than just a collection of old songs.

"I wanted the music to feel like a total work-a new work," Mitchell says in the liner notes. "No matter what I did, though, at that length, it remained merely a collection of songs."

Eventually, after two years, she had this new set, 53 songs that for her speak as a new work. "I am a painter who writes songs," Mitchell says. "My songs are very visual. The words create scenes�What I have done here is to gather some of these scenes (like a documentary filmmaker) and by juxtaposition, edit them into a whole new work."