Coyote (song)
Encyclopedia
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
's 1976 album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
Hejira
Hejira (album)
Hejira is a 1976 folk/rock/jazz album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. The album title is a transliteration of the Arabic word hijra, which means "journey", referring specifically to the prophet Muhammad's and his followers' escape from Mecca to Medina in 622...
and also the album's first single.
Though the song had been introduced (in embryonic form) on the tour to support 1975's
1975 in music
-January–April:*January 2 - New York City U.S. District Court Judge Richard Owen rules that former Beatle John Lennon and his lawyers can have access to Department of Immigration files pertaining to his deportation case....
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a studio album by Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell.-Reception:The album was not as radio-friendly as Mitchell's earlier work, and although the album achieved initial commercial success, reaching number four on the charts and quickly going gold, contemporary reviewers...
, "Coyote" was a significant musical departure: where Hissing was ornate with pianos, layered vocals and percussion, "Coyote" was stripped down to electric and acoustic guitars and a fretless bass guitar played by legendary virtuoso Jaco Pastorius
Jaco Pastorius
John Francis Anthony Pastorius III , known as Jaco Pastorius, was an American jazz musician and composer widely acknowledged as a virtuoso electric bass player....
. In a sense, this was similar to Mitchell's early albums, but the sound was extremely spacious, even repetitive, with the verses made much longer and more like a long story. Thus, although this is one of the faster-tempo songs on Hejira, it still lasts for an even five minutes. Mitchell's guitar itself was in an unusual (low to high) C-G-D-F-C-E tuning - presumably a type of open tuning designed to play a seventh, ninth, or even eleventh chord
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...
.
Lyrically, "Coyote" is concerned with the difficulty of establishing any sort of connection with people who come from "different sets of circumstance" (as the song has it). In particular it describes an encounter (which turns into a one night stand) between the narrator (possibly meant to be Mitchell herself as there is a reference in the lyrics to her coming home from the studio) and "Coyote", a ranch worker. In Chris O'Dell's 2009 autobiography Miss O'Dell she details an affair she had with married playwright Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
and states that Shepard then cheated on her with Joni Mitchell. O'Dell claims that "Coyote" is written about Sam Shepard. Coyote represents nature contrasted with the narrator's big city (presumably LA) life where "pills and powders" are necessary to "get them through this passion play". The aforementioned line is also a reference to Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
's Rolling Thunder Revue
Rolling Thunder Revue
The Rolling Thunder Revue was a famed U.S. concert tour consisting of a traveling caravan of musicians, headed by Bob Dylan, that took place in late 1975 and early 1976; the prevailing theory was that the tour was named after the Native American shaman Rolling Thunder. Others maintained that tour...
, which Mitchell was a part of in the fall of 1975.
A version of "Coyote" was performed by Mitchell with The Band
The Band
The Band was an acclaimed and influential roots rock group. The original group consisted of Rick Danko , Garth Hudson , Richard Manuel , and Robbie Robertson , and Levon Helm...
for the concert movie The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz was a concert by the rock group The Band, held on American Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco...
and is included on the soundtrack. The song was also covered by Spirit of the West
Spirit of the West
Spirit of the West are a Canadian folk rock band, who were popular on the Canadian folk music scene in the 1980s before evolving a blend of hard rock, Britpop, and Celtic folk influences which made them one of Canada's most successful alternative rock acts in the 1990s.-Early years:The band began...
on the 1992 Mitchell tribute album Back to the Garden
Back to the Garden
Back to the Garden is a 1992 tribute album to Joni Mitchell .It was released on Intrepid Records, after the Canadian chart success of their 1991 Bruce Cockburn tribute, Kick at the Darkness....
.
External links
- "Coyote" at Last.fmLast.fmLast.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....
- "Coyote" lyrics at Joni Mitchell's official site