Who did Joni Mitchell write her single ‘Coyote’ about?
A significant reason why Joni Mitchell is so beloved is her specificity. Her songs are confessionals, pulling inspiration from her personal life and combining images from her memory with pure poetry to create something sharply emotional. Even though her music is about her, it’s that personal approach that somehow makes it relatable. Even when certain songs are about certain people, her audience can relate, with ‘Coyote’ being an especially beloved piece on doomed love.
“I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me,” Mitchell once said. Out of all her albums, her 1976 eighth album, Hejira, felt special. It was a period where her love for music-making seemed reinvigorated. In the early 1970s, on albums like Blue, For The Roses and Court and Spark, there was a palpable feeling of frustration or entrapment as the artist’s own success had begun to feel smothering. But by the middle of the decade, after a period of travel and touring, there was a sense of freedom and energy back.
Part of that came down to her time spent on the Rolling Thunder Revue, Bob Dylan’s landmark tour that gathered together the brightest talents of his time. Mitchell joined him on the road, along with the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGuinn and more. The energy was so inspiring that despite only being booked to perform one night, Mitchell played three shows and stayed on with the tour for several days.
But part of it came down to the man she met there. It was a perfect storm of musical inspiration and the inspiration of infatuation, providing the ultimate source material for a song. Captured first in Martin Scorsese’s documentary of the tour, Mitchell plays the song with Dylan and McGuinn, who accompany her on guitars. Of the track and its conception, McGuinn says before their performance that Mitchell “wrote this song about this tour and on this tour and for this tour”. It just happened to be that on that tour, she’d just happened to meet someone special.
So, who is ‘Coyote’ about?
As the tour went on, Bob Dylan was already acutely aware of its cultural impact. He knew he was doing something special, so he brought in people to capture it. Along with a film crew, he hired Sam Shepard, a writer, actor and playwright who at that point was a cult figure existing on the fringes of the art and music world, to observe the tour and write a screenplay about it.
He was linked to plenty of people on the tour. Patti Smith, his ex-lover and past collaborator who Sam Shepard wrote one of his plays with, was there. Allen Ginsberg, who he’d worked with on Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother, was there. And Dylan simply trusted Shepard could produce the kind of cool yet romantic tale he wanted to be told of the tour.
Romance certainly came easy, and Shepard and Mitchell hit it off. But, as she navigates through the song’s lyrics, their love was doomed by “such different sets of circumstance”.
The first was that, at the time, Shepard was married. Not only was he having an affair with Mitchell, but he was also linked to the tour’s manager, Christine O’Dell, as she sings, “He’s got a woman at home, another woman down the hall, but he seems to want me anyway.”
The second was that Mitchell and Shepard’s lives simply couldn’t be more different. “I’m up all night in the studios / And you’re up early on your ranch,” she sings as she is focused on her work, and he was a recluse, living on a farm with a more peaceful life. Yet still, the attraction was palpable as Mitchell’s lyrics seductively sing of desire, “That coyote’s at my door / He pins me in a corner, and he won’t take “no!” / He drags me out on the dance floor / And we’re dancing close and slow.”
But despite the tumult of the affair and the doomed nature of their attraction, Mitchell still got a great song out of it, concluding, “No regrets, coyote”.
