@lisarainbow9703 nailed it. Joni’s “Shadows and Light” tour was stellar. Jazz fusion all star band with Joni including Pat Matheny (guitar), Lyle Mays (keys). Jaco Pastorius (bass), Michael Brecker (sax). Toured behind the album “Hejira” that “Coyote” (about actor Sam Shepard), “Amelia” and other terrific songs.
Another must-see of Joni live: "Amelia " from the Shadows and Lights tour-- with Jaco Pastorius on bass, and Pat Metheny on guitar. It's next level....
Came here to say this, although "Amelia" is just her and her guitar, and it is magic. But the "Shadows And Light" concert movie is pure gold. So many great tracks that DO feature that band of killers she had with her - "Free Man In Paris," "In France They Kiss On Main Street," pick one.
Great pick - love this version best. And great analysis. Apparently the song was (at least in part) about a short relationship she had with the playwright/actor Sam Shepherd. And Coyote is a trickster spirit/entity in some Indigenous traditions. So it all fits. Think you’d also love: Free Man in Paris Help Me River (Oh, and one of her biggest fans ever was Prince. Game recognizes game.) Edited because you already did Case of You. My bad. 👍)
Your assessment is pretty spot on. Joni is incomparable. She goes straight to your soul. I can't think of any other female artist as prolific and multi-dimensional, except kd lang, who also happens to be Canadian and a huge fan of Joni. Best female voice of our time. Check out her cover of Hallelujah (performed live at the Juno awards or the winter Olympics.) It's sublime. Also her duets with Tony Bennet. 💙
With Robbie Robertson (from The Band) playing guitar behind Joni. Joni is such an amazing songwriter, singer, musician (multiple instruments), and artist. Please also do her songs: "River", "Help Me", "All I Want", "A Case of You", and "Green."
Unfortunately you did not do the album version which featured the legendary Jaco Pastorious on bass Joni hsd many phases in her career Big Yellow Taxi is at the beginning She had folk albums and then morphed to Steely Dan type pop jazz fusion eventually going full throttle jaxz on her Mingus album with Herbie Hancock Wayne Shorter and Jaco She also had a live album with Pat Metheny She then did a few pop albums befote recently doing orchestral reworks of her songs My fave albums are Hissing of Summer Lawns which is a scathing critique of middle class suburban life and Heijira which chronicled a trip across the country she made after a failed relationship You might want to hear Paprika Plains which is a 16 min tone poem or The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey about a serial killer featuring actual wolves or the heartbreaking Beat Of Black Wings about a vet with PTSD Those tracks showcase Joni's versatility and her genius
IIRC, it also featured Pat Metheny on guitar (or was that just from the Shadows and Light concert?). So,not too shabby... But I will say that Robbie and Rick held there own quite nicely. Hejira and Hissing are my two favorite Joni albums as well.
Get her album Blue, it is known as the 4th greatest selling album in Rock and Roll history. Every one of her songs on the album will captivate you. Also, go back to this concert, the Last Waltz and listen Dylan sing Forever Young, a song for his first song and the same band as Joni used backs him. It is a wonderful opportunity to see Dylan beaming over his son. It is great too.
She wrote this song while she was touring with Bob Dylan in 1975. That tour was called the Rolling Thunder Revue. She came in when the tour had already started, like a hitcher. May be she's talking about that.
This song is from her jazz era., and she delves into this genre even deeper in subsequent albums. Got to hear her albums BLUE (folk) and COURT AND SPARK (folk/rock/jazz). My all-time favorite artist and singer-songwriter. I believe Coyote is about her very short fling with the playwright Sam Sheppard.
The lp Hejira, from which this song is featured, is full of amazing jazz/rock tunes... Pick any other track, and check it out! Right about the poetry, but Joni can sing as well, with her voice changing dramatically over the decades of her career. IMO, Joni is THE best (male OR female!) singer/songwriter/musician of the last half of the 1900s.
Must be something in the water on the Canadian prairies. They gave us Joni, Buffy St. Marie, Neil Young, Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Jann Arden, The Crash Test Dummies and even Nickelback. And other than Nickelback, they all have unusual phrasing.
If you want to go into Joni's deeper tracks I highly recommend "Woodstock" 'Blue' "Down to You" "Let the Wind Carry Me" "The Magdalene Laundries" "Windfall" Her poetry is masterful. Check out her more recent paintings if you can as well, She is an extraordinary painter.
You hit it with poetry: I know, no one's going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone Well, I looked at the granite markers Those tributes to finality, to eternity And then I looked at myself here Chicken scratching for my immortality In the church, they light the candles And the wax rolls down like tears There is the hope and the hopelessness I've witnessed thirty years We're only particles of change I know, I know Orbiting around the sun But how can I have that point of view When I'm always bound and tied to someone White flags of winter chimneys Wave truce against the moon In the mirrors of a modern bank From the window of a hotel room
Listen to "Lesson In Survival", "Electricity", "For The Roses" and "Woman Of Heart And Mind" from Joni's most beautiful and yet overlooked album "For The Roses" (1972).
She's describing a coyote and how she met him on her journey, her 'Hejira'. Yeah it's a metaphor but it also happened which makes implied, symbolic and literal meaning smash together into a song that Joni writes in the way that only she can.
How is it no one recognizes that Coyote is in some Native American mythologies a feral Trickster spirit? He's clever, audacious, but ruled by his appetites. Meanwhile, Joni is that Hawk; free, agile, clear-eyed, as is demonstrated in how she observes everything and is able to put it clearly in her lyrics. She's a 'hitcher'; they aren't headed to the same destination, they aren't really traveling companions, just briefly traveling together out of convenience. But she's "a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway"; she's intending to continue moving on without him and soon. It's not a 'love affair'; it's at best a one-night stand.
Love all the details you give in your reaction. If you haven't already, I'd listen to these songs: Both Sides Now - the original version she did as a young woman and the remake she did when she was in her 60's. Free Man in Paris (about David Geffen) The Circle Game River Help Me
This is a case of an alpha female, JM, encountering andalpha male, Sam Shepard, great American playwright, actor, and sometime musician. He's depicted as a major player, but she is too. He didn't run her down, she just hitched a ride.
I 2nd the advice to check out the album version from Hejira as well as the live version from 'Shadows & Light'. This is nice but while The Band was fine at what they did, to hear Joni's brilliant composition come out in this song you have to hear it with Jazz greats like Jaco, & others, etc... backing her. 'White lines on the freeway'..is also likely a double reference to a cocaine habit she was kicking.
This is the opening song on the greatest album ever made, Hejira. Great performance by Joni; I'm not so keen on the arrangement - the synths add nothing, and the drumming, though very good, loses the relentless rhythmic drive of the studio take, even though there are no drums on that version! I heartily commend the album to you. Every single song is *brilliant*, no messing, and the arrangements are fantastically sparse and spacious.
"Effervescence" - great word! Listen again and pay attention to the lyrics - Coyote is some real guy she meets while hitch-hiking (which no one does anymore). I don't think it's really metaphorical!
It’s actually about her affair with actor/playwright Sam Shepard during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour in ‘74-‘75. So even the hitch-hiking is a metaphor, for being “picked up” (and later, sadly, dropped off).
How many women could include such a personal lyric as "He picks up my scent on his fingers as he's watching the waitress's legs." ? Joni can be blunt and so poetic at the same time. Nice review/reaction.
Oh man Joni, Carol King & please check out/react to Linda Ronstadt. These are wonderful songs Blue Bayou & her song You're no good #headphonesoftruth #jayrahvisions
This song is about Sam Elliot who was a married man, with a lover on the road. Joni became his lover too during Bob Dylan’s tour The Rolling Stone Revue “
You can break your own rules if you are willing to accept the consequences, glad you did because watching her live performance on stage is fun. I was curious to hear your expletives in your reaction of this song. There are so many great live versions of many of her songs, but yes, her studio versions are not to be looked over. This is a great video of her playing with Bob Dylan & Roger McGuinn at Gordon Lightfoot's house 1975....ruclips.net/video/zeaO5UZ5OcI/видео.html. I enjoyed your reaction, only when you talk over the first verse of a song you might want to restart, not judging, just sayin'. Oh, & when I was a kid hearing tracks from Blue, For The Roses & Ladies of the Canyon I thought she was painting a picture with her lyrics put to beautiful composition with skillful arrangement which made it more enchanting and easier to visualize her story or content.☮☯
JE NE SAIS QUOI and neither did the coyote, as she had him pegged... the white lines were Joni`s travels playing for us & Dude checkout the live Cali show w/ the all star jazz band, C`ETAIT MAGNIFIQUE.. my wify`s Cajun so Joni is her soul sister with strait blonde hair...just found you (utube ai sucks) diggin your style so keep on rockin & giddyup Jay Rah Visions
Sorry that my comment brought on so much shade, but I am no fledgling to music…23 years and then some plying my craft until a turn in my life took me into the literary arts. I earned my degrees the hard way and do feel I had a point to make: Are you using intellectualism as a cover, because that’s how it came across to me. And it’s fine to disagree but I studied under a principle that words are costly as is time. Speak plainly and with conviction and forgo the hyperbole and you will have a broader audience. You can consider it or throw it in the waste can.
Interesting that you use the word caricature regarding Joni's poetry, because she thinks of herself principally as a painter rather than a musician (though she is clearly both).
I think you just don’t get it so you spin every literal nuance or whatever you can conjure to explain what you just heard. You were totally lost and just threw out every adjective you could fathom to explain what you couldn’t explain.
I'm glad you are the auspice for which greater musical comprehension can be studied. Perhaps or was this incoherent rambling meandering on when music is subjective. So since you're obviously superior in your understanding and I'm merely incompetent and you dictate how music is perceived and interpreted perhaps you and your arcane wisdom can inform me about what I'm meant to "get". This level of hubris and pejorative echo chamber you dwell within is more indicative that the nuance that you claim I purport is ironically what you are inept. But again I'm glad you possess a higher level a music understanding that I don't.
He was pretty damn close to the meaning of the song. Without knowing it’s history. So I would say you are incorrect in your assessment of his assessment.
You are the first one to react to this performance which I absolutely love.
@lisarainbow9703 nailed it. Joni’s “Shadows and Light” tour was stellar. Jazz fusion all star band with Joni including Pat Matheny (guitar), Lyle Mays (keys). Jaco Pastorius (bass), Michael Brecker (sax).
Toured behind the album “Hejira” that “Coyote” (about actor Sam Shepard), “Amelia” and other terrific songs.
There's some more gems from "The Last Waltz". Van Morrison-Caravan & Neil Young-Helpless(W/Joni backing vocals).
With winter coming a great song to check out is "I Wish I had a River".
An amazing woman that casts a spell on me. Every time she sings and moves around on the stage.
Another must-see of Joni live:
"Amelia " from the Shadows and Lights tour-- with Jaco Pastorius on bass, and Pat Metheny on guitar.
It's next level....
Came here to say this, although "Amelia" is just her and her guitar, and it is magic. But the "Shadows And Light" concert movie is pure gold. So many great tracks that DO feature that band of killers she had with her - "Free Man In Paris," "In France They Kiss On Main Street," pick one.
@@joeday4293 Pat Metheny definitely does the outro solo on Amelia...
Shadows and Lights is absolute gold, indeed.
Great pick - love this version best. And great analysis. Apparently the song was (at least in part) about a short relationship she had with the playwright/actor Sam Shepherd. And Coyote is a trickster spirit/entity in some Indigenous traditions. So it all fits.
Think you’d also love:
Free Man in Paris
Help Me
River
(Oh, and one of her biggest fans ever was Prince. Game recognizes game.)
Edited because you already did Case of You. My bad. 👍)
she had at least 50 guitar tunings of her own design!
You've just found the lyrical equivalent of Steely Dan :) Genius writing
Hardly equivalent. Far better, IMHO.
I love the song Little Green, written about her baby daughter whom she gave up for adoption. Later in life they were reunited.
Your assessment is pretty spot on.
Joni is incomparable. She goes straight to your soul. I can't think of any other female artist as prolific and multi-dimensional, except kd lang, who also happens to be Canadian and a huge fan of Joni. Best female voice of our time. Check out her cover of Hallelujah (performed live at the Juno awards or the winter Olympics.) It's sublime. Also her duets with Tony Bennet. 💙
With Robbie Robertson (from The Band) playing guitar behind Joni. Joni is such an amazing songwriter, singer, musician (multiple instruments), and artist. Please also do her songs: "River", "Help Me", "All I Want", "A Case of You", and "Green."
Check out A Case of You by her. James Taylor on guitar and Joni on dulcimer and vocals. Such a great song.
Unfortunately you did not do the album version which featured the legendary Jaco Pastorious on bass
Joni hsd many phases in her career Big Yellow Taxi is at the beginning She had folk albums and then morphed to Steely Dan type pop jazz fusion eventually going full throttle jaxz on her Mingus album with Herbie Hancock Wayne Shorter and Jaco She also had a live album with Pat Metheny
She then did a few pop albums befote recently doing orchestral reworks of her songs
My fave albums are Hissing of Summer Lawns which is a scathing critique of middle class suburban life and Heijira which chronicled a trip across the country she made after a failed relationship
You might want to hear Paprika Plains which is a 16 min tone poem or The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey about a serial killer featuring actual wolves or the heartbreaking Beat Of Black Wings about a vet with PTSD Those tracks showcase Joni's versatility and her genius
That bass is sublime!!!!
IIRC, it also featured Pat Metheny on guitar (or was that just from the Shadows and Light concert?). So,not too shabby... But I will say that Robbie and Rick held there own quite nicely. Hejira and Hissing are my two favorite Joni albums as well.
Get her album Blue, it is known as the 4th greatest selling album in Rock and Roll history. Every one of her songs on the album will captivate you. Also, go back to this concert, the Last Waltz and listen Dylan sing Forever Young, a song for his first song and the same band as Joni used backs him. It is a wonderful opportunity to see Dylan beaming over his son. It is great too.
She wrote this song while she was touring with Bob Dylan in 1975. That tour was called the Rolling Thunder Revue. She came in when the tour had already started, like a hitcher. May be she's talking about that.
This song is from her jazz era., and she delves into this genre even deeper in subsequent albums. Got to hear her albums BLUE (folk) and COURT AND SPARK (folk/rock/jazz). My all-time favorite artist and singer-songwriter. I believe Coyote is about her very short fling with the playwright Sam Sheppard.
The lp Hejira, from which this song is featured, is full of amazing jazz/rock tunes... Pick any other track, and check it out!
Right about the poetry, but Joni can sing as well, with her voice changing dramatically over the decades of her career. IMO, Joni is THE best (male OR female!) singer/songwriter/musician of the last half of the 1900s.
Must be something in the water on the Canadian prairies. They gave us Joni, Buffy St. Marie, Neil Young, Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Jann Arden, The Crash Test Dummies and even Nickelback. And other than Nickelback, they all have unusual phrasing.
Don't forget Robbie Robertson and the rest of The Band, sans Levon Helm who was from Arkansas.
If you want to go into Joni's deeper tracks I highly recommend "Woodstock" 'Blue'
"Down to You"
"Let the Wind Carry Me"
"The Magdalene Laundries"
"Windfall"
Her poetry is masterful. Check out her more recent paintings if you can as well, She is an extraordinary painter.
Excellent review young man. Joni Mitchell’s music is hard to put into words or pidgeon hole, your assessment is very good.
Hejira - the whole damn album
You hit it with poetry:
I know, no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone
Well, I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality, to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church, they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There is the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Wave truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room
Just discovered your channel, love your insights into the music. So many things I don't notice until you point them out. thanks
"Hejira" is another one of hers with bars that are amazingly profound:
"Each of us so deep and so superficial
Between the forceps and the stone"
My absolute favorite from that album.
Joni is a great jazz musician too.
Great singer and storyteller.
Love the comp to Reed, Cohen and Dylan. Hadn't thought of her that way, but it's a great lens to look through.
No question, she's on par with these greats, if not bests them in many ways (i.e in lyrics, voice, and as a musician). I'm a fan, as you can see. :)
Listen to "Lesson In Survival", "Electricity", "For The Roses" and "Woman Of Heart And Mind" from Joni's most beautiful and yet overlooked album "For The Roses" (1972).
Finally ... an intellectual take on one of my Joni favorites. Thanks for the deep dive , man.
She's describing a coyote and how she met him on her journey, her 'Hejira'. Yeah it's a metaphor but it also happened which makes implied, symbolic and literal meaning smash together into a song that Joni writes in the way that only she can.
How is it no one recognizes that Coyote is in some Native American mythologies a feral Trickster spirit? He's clever, audacious, but ruled by his appetites.
Meanwhile, Joni is that Hawk; free, agile, clear-eyed, as is demonstrated in how she observes everything and is able to put it clearly in her lyrics.
She's a 'hitcher'; they aren't headed to the same destination, they aren't really traveling companions, just briefly traveling together out of convenience. But she's "a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway"; she's intending to continue moving on without him and soon.
It's not a 'love affair'; it's at best a one-night stand.
Love all the details you give in your reaction. If you haven't already, I'd listen to these songs:
Both Sides Now - the original version she did as a young woman and the remake she did when she was in her 60's.
Free Man in Paris (about David Geffen)
The Circle Game
River
Help Me
terrific job
Joni kicks ass.
The song is about Sam Shepard (playwriter, actor.)
Check out her seventy's albums.
Peace on earth.
Joni is a goddess
This is a case of an alpha female, JM, encountering andalpha male, Sam Shepard, great American playwright, actor, and sometime musician. He's depicted as a major player, but she is too. He didn't run her down, she just hitched a ride.
Greatest female songwriter ever.
Greatest songwriter ever
I 2nd the advice to check out the album version from Hejira as well as the live version from 'Shadows & Light'. This is nice but while The Band was fine at what they did, to hear Joni's brilliant composition come out in this song you have to hear it with Jazz greats like Jaco, & others, etc... backing her. 'White lines on the freeway'..is also likely a double reference to a cocaine habit she was kicking.
This is the opening song on the greatest album ever made, Hejira. Great performance by Joni; I'm not so keen on the arrangement - the synths add nothing, and the drumming, though very good, loses the relentless rhythmic drive of the studio take, even though there are no drums on that version! I heartily commend the album to you. Every single song is *brilliant*, no messing, and the arrangements are fantastically sparse and spacious.
"Effervescence" - great word! Listen again and pay attention to the lyrics - Coyote is some real guy she meets while hitch-hiking (which no one does anymore). I don't think it's really metaphorical!
It’s actually about her affair with actor/playwright Sam Shepard during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour in ‘74-‘75. So even the hitch-hiking is a metaphor, for being “picked up” (and later, sadly, dropped off).
☮️💙
Genius .
I agree with your interpretation of Joni as an artist. Hard to put your finger on it she always delivers something unique and poignant.
Good comments. Thanks
You should really check out her "Shadows and Light" performance with Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny.
"No regrets, Coyote, I'll just get off up aways."
How many women could include such a personal lyric as "He picks up my scent on his fingers as he's watching the waitress's legs." ? Joni can be blunt and so poetic at the same time. Nice review/reaction.
Oh man Joni, Carol King & please check out/react to Linda Ronstadt. These are wonderful songs Blue Bayou & her song You're no good #headphonesoftruth #jayrahvisions
You always miss the forest for the trees
Joni is the best the best. Try Amelia or Song for Sharon
❤
The words man....the freaking words......they are beautiful and you do not even comment on them. Living breathing beat poet.
I literally analyze the lyrics at the end of the video
This song is about Sam Elliot who was a married man, with a lover on the road. Joni became his lover too during Bob Dylan’s tour The Rolling Stone Revue “
It was Sam Shepard. And it was Rolling Thunder.
@@keef7224 you’re right. I was going off memory. Thanks for the correction!
Coyote is a male stalker type........Joni is an ICON. Leonard Cohen.....OMG, do some, LOVE him; two Canadian Icons right here.
You can break your own rules if you are willing to accept the consequences, glad you did because watching her live performance on stage is fun. I was curious to hear your expletives in your reaction of this song. There are so many great live versions of many of her songs, but yes, her studio versions are not to be looked over. This is a great video of her playing with Bob Dylan & Roger McGuinn at Gordon Lightfoot's house 1975....ruclips.net/video/zeaO5UZ5OcI/видео.html. I enjoyed your reaction, only when you talk over the first verse of a song you might want to restart, not judging, just sayin'.
Oh, & when I was a kid hearing tracks from Blue, For The Roses & Ladies of the Canyon I thought she was painting a picture with her lyrics put to beautiful composition with skillful arrangement which made it more enchanting and easier to visualize her story or content.☮☯
JE NE SAIS QUOI and neither did the coyote, as she had him pegged... the white lines were Joni`s travels playing for us & Dude checkout the live Cali show w/ the all star jazz band, C`ETAIT MAGNIFIQUE.. my wify`s Cajun so Joni is her soul sister with strait blonde hair...just found you (utube ai sucks) diggin your style so keep on rockin & giddyup Jay Rah Visions
Sorry that my comment brought on so much shade, but I am no fledgling to music…23 years and then some plying my craft until a turn in my life took me into the literary arts. I earned my degrees the hard way and do feel I had a point to make: Are you using intellectualism as a cover, because that’s how it came across to me. And it’s fine to disagree but I studied under a principle that words are costly as is time. Speak plainly and with conviction and forgo the hyperbole and you will have a broader audience. You can consider it or throw it in the waste can.
Do joni's both sides now. One of the great works of art of the 20th century.
Coyote is about a dude she had a relationship with. Dude was a player.
I think it’s about Sam Elliot
@@salmuscles sam shepard
Your reactions are dead on.
She is great!!! But really its all about the band!!!! Martin Scorsese filmed this just so you know.He was a fan of the band.
Try Edith and the kingpin.
Prince's favorite song, as he noted.
Interesting that you use the word caricature regarding Joni's poetry, because she thinks of herself principally as a painter rather than a musician (though she is clearly both).
Sadly the bass, which is the best part of the song doesn't come through in this live recording
Good song, but I like 'Songs to Aging Children Come', and ' The Seagull Song' better.
.
She puts Taylor Swift to shame
I think you just don’t get it so you spin every literal nuance or whatever you can conjure to explain what you just heard. You were totally lost and just threw out every adjective you could fathom to explain what you couldn’t explain.
I'm glad you are the auspice for which greater musical comprehension can be studied. Perhaps or was this incoherent rambling meandering on when music is subjective. So since you're obviously superior in your understanding and I'm merely incompetent and you dictate how music is perceived and interpreted perhaps you and your arcane wisdom can inform me about what I'm meant to "get". This level of hubris and pejorative echo chamber you dwell within is more indicative that the nuance that you claim I purport is ironically what you are inept. But again I'm glad you possess a higher level a music understanding that I don't.
He was pretty damn close to the meaning of the song. Without knowing it’s history. So I would say you are incorrect in your assessment of his assessment.