The line about 'getting through this Passion Play' from Coyote threw up an association with the five strong women portrayed in a documentary I bought on DVD a few years ago. The patriarchal staging and organisation of the world's most famous 'Passion play' in the Bavarian mountain village called Oberammergau has never really been challenged by the ladies of the village, but the five 'Ammerzons' as they call themselves have made subtle subversive changes to the way the female actors are treated in the stagings. I thought back to my own hiking tour centred in the village 9 years ago and remembered the hang gliding ramp at the peak of one of the mountains that Anneliese Zunterer is seen hang gliding from in the film and it seemed like this corresponded to the eagle image in Joni's song. The full film is not available on YouTube but this short trailer is. The interviews in German voice the women's good-natured digs at the men who run things there. Monika's point is a linguistic one. In the village the men have decided to change the gender of the word from the feminine 'die' Passion (correct German) to masculine 'der' Passion (who cares what's correct as long as it sounds male German)
Once again I seemed to miss the creation of this thread several hours ago, despite scanning the "new topics" several times wondering when it would appear. Anyway, now that it's here... This is the nub of the matter, and why I consider Hissing and Hejira to jointly represent her peak. I enjoy Don Juan, but it took me a little while to feel comfortable with it, and Mingus I found quite "inaccessible" to someone who is not a fan of pure jazz. Coyote: One can trace a lineage of fast-paced songs by Joni that tell a narrative so packed with words and images that they seem to require every note to accommodate them all. Beginning with Conversation, we can then list Carey, In France They Kiss on Main Street, Don't Interrupt the Sorrow, Coyote, Black Crow, and later on there is Talk to Me and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. Coyote is perhaps the archetypal example, the one that could have been the model to which all those other songs aspire. This song is almost a novel in itself - eat your heart out Jack Kerouac! Honestly, one could make quite a decent movie just out of what happens in this song. She is obviously madly smitten by this guy she calls Coyote, while he seems to regard her as someone with who to have a bit of pleasant fun; he is an independent spirit and has lots of other things that preoccupy him along the way in their journey. there are plenty of slightly cryptic references in this song that I expect we will discuss further - not sure what this "looking through keyholes" was about. Anyway, as you can guess, this is a top tier JM song for me, and one of my two favourites from the album. Not sure if it takes the top spot. I'll have to THINK about it.
My favorite album by her by far, but "Coyote" is not one of my favorite tracks, that honor would go to "Song For Sharon."
Just looking at the tuning for this song from her site. Never tried it, but hearing it makes you want to give it a go. She used it aswell for songs like Just like this train. Woman of Heart and Mind has the same tuning pattern but is a half step lower (B). She calls this tuning C77374 or CGDFCE. To get an idea of this open chord in standard tuning, if you strummed x54030 (a well known D type chord, often used when in key G) you get a similar add2 add4 effect. This chord is heavily used on Sugar Mountain. If strummed open it gives a chord I've just seen described on the site as Cadd9(sus4). But this isn't right as E (the third) is present. So it looks to me like a a Cadd9 add11 or possibly Cadd2 add4 tuning. Nick Drake used something similar to this - CGCFCE for Pink Moon.
Very interesting, Henry. You've sent me down a rabbit hole. The passion play is mentioned at this point in the lyrics: Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes He had those same eyes just like yours Under your dark glasses Privately probing the public rooms And peeking thru keyholes in numbered doors Where the players lick their wounds And take their temporary lovers And their pills and powders to get them thru this passion play With passion plays being accounts of the passion of the Christ and final period of his life leading up to his crucifixion. Nowadays, we use the word 'passion' just to indicate very strong, intense, uncontrollable emotions but it comes from the Latin pati which means "to suffer." Vivid emotions can be painful. Joni paints a portrait here of all the excess, drugs and sex of the tour merely being masks and crutches everyone is using to get through a deeper kind of emotional suffering. Behind all these doors in the hotel, you can see all these different people (musicians, groupies, roadies, managers, etc.) all looking to get a fix of something to hide from their inner darkness. All that packed into just a phrase. Joni would later record a song called "Passion Play (When All the Slaves Are Free)" on 1991's Night Ride Home, which similarly uses the passion play and Christ imagery to tell a larger story of humanity suffering. In 'Coyote' it is personal, intimate suffering. In that later song, it is global suffering. (Jethro Tull also has an album called A Passion Play, but that title seems ironic given some of the content of the album.)
I think we should give the tuning a name – how about 'Danko's doom' (watch how much thinking he has to put into playing bass around her notes on the Last Waltz). I'm no musician but I think his is a very good attempt. The Band didn't do so well on the other tracks with her. In fact one is a bit of a train wreck, IIRC.
With the money Joni apparently cost him by pulling the plug on the '76 tour (as you posted upthread), she should've bought him a copy. Joni's instincts were spot-on during this period. I like Jaco, but four songs with him were plenty--the rest of the tracks didn't need his sound.
Shepherd (aka “Coyote”) was a groupie of sorts. I believe he was hired by some magazine to write about the tour (“peek through keyholes”) but apparently got sucked in by all the partying and couldn’t maintain any journalistic objectivity. He pretty much gave up. I could be wrong but don’t think he ever published anything about it.
Just listened to Coyote last night (trying to listen to most of it today), sounded like she was hypnotized by this guy he seemed like he was married. Going sleeping around with other females. But as the song goes, she doesn't judge him for it, she use to do the same when she was younger. At the end, she gives advice to go home, stop running and deal with your issues or fly away. But that's the way i see it though.
Nicely wrapped together PW. What a fantastic range of allusion she was able to fall back on. It sounds like there's not one syllable in the song that doesn't propel us forward to a new image, or as happened to me, a new association. So little reliance on repetition and tag lines throughout this song. Perhaps too little for it's own good. It's harder to play and sing than the next song I would imagine unless you had supreme confidence in your articulation and skill at hooking listeners without any hooks! My guess Coyote is underrepresented in cover versions.
コヨーテ bars are springing up all over Tokyo as we speak. The 恕仁 craze is sweeping the country. (koyo-te & jo-ni)
As I said when I first got on this marvelous song by song bus, this album and it's two predecessors are like oxygen to me, and there have been times when I simply cannot stand to hear anything else. I first came to Hejira in 1985. I was in the Air Force in Germany (that's how I managed to swing going to Paris). The currency exchange rate was fantastic at the time and I was able to put together a sound system that would've been way out of my price range otherwise. Hejira was one of the first albums I bought to take that rig out for a spin. I'd never heard Jaco so when he started sproinging forth under the opening chords of "Coyote" I was like whoa! I vividly remember reaching over to bump up the low end on my equalizer. I'm pretty sure the album was love at first listen - having grown up in the rural US West I was intimately familiar with epic car treks across endless vistas, so that vibe had to have clicked right in. But I also associate it with Germany, as that's where I bonded with it. And one of my favorite directors is Wim Wenders, a German who made some of the greatest road movies I've ever seen. And of course it's from the era where Joni was hanging out with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg & discovering Buddhism. All of this conglomerates into forming a large part of the Black Thumb Creative Mindset™, so yeah ... I love Hejira.
I don’t know if this is Joni's "best" album but of her catalog it means the most to me, and it's the one I’ve listened to the most. In past Joni threads here I’ve included a lot of personal stories and recollections. Maybe they're boring or irrelevant sometimes, but PW’s post was quite personal, so I’ll take that as permission to do the same. (After Hejira I’ll be much less active until we get to Night Ride Home, so this will be my last big hurrah for a while.) Hejira is very important to me, mostly because of its travel theme. It’s deeply intertwined with certain experiences and periods of my life, and it’s hard for me to separate the music on it from the experiences that are linked with it in my head. My parents and one grandfather experienced a lot of travel and adventure, and I inherited the bug. I never had kids and have been self employed almost all my adult life, so I’ve been able to indulge that with few limitations. (My wife and I are still very active travelers.) I’d been a Joni fan since Blue, and when she released Hejira, it struck a deep chord. I've listened to it countless times at home, but more than that, it's been a travel companion. In ’81 I started doing the backpacker thing, mostly in Asia. There were so many experiences and adventures, and I almost always brought music with me. Before iTunes it was a Walkman and a small collection of cassettes. On the road I listened to Hejira a lot, maybe more than any other album—on long solo treks through the Himalayas, stranded in a Sri Lankan village waiting for a bus that never came, on long night trains across India, trying to sleep on the floor of a night train through Burma (while a pool of urine from the toilet inched towards me!), alone and snowed in at a remote, abandoned hotel near Mt. Everest in what felt like a scene from The Shining, exploring Kuala Lumpur on a sweltering December day and 24 hours later walking through a Moscow snowstorm at 3 AM, seeing Angkor Wat for the first time with Khmer Rouge shells exploding in the distance, having most of my valuables stolen in a Nepalese village and then hitching a helicopter ride to Kathmandu on Christmas Eve… a lot of stuff that seems quite improbable now. That must sound like boasting and truthfully, I guess it is, but those are my associations with Hejira. It was right there, unwavering, making the good experiences better and helping me through the tough ones. (Music is a powerful trigger of memories. Imagine that you experienced those things, and that this album was a link to them.) I always liked the name of the album with it’s suggestion of escape; a journey as a noble form of escape. in part, I ran off to Asia to escape some difficult things at home, to escape myself. So that was another way this this album resonated with me. In that sense it still does. ------------------------ On the Hissing thread it seemed like several people saw Hejira as a big departure for Joni; a collection of songs that were very different from her earlier work. The unifying theme of travel was new, but musically this album never struck me as being all that radical or different. Maybe that’s only because I got to know it so well and become so comfortable with it. It’s something I’ll be thinking about as we move forward. Someone pointed out in the last thread that with Hejira, Joni pretty much stopped playing the piano. I hadn't realized that before! I’m not sure how much (or whether) that has influenced my appreciation of the album. That’s another thing I’ll be thinking about. As with Hissing, I love all the songs on this album except for two that always left me scratching my head a bit. One is probably be a big favorite here, the other I’m not sure about. Until today I had no idea that everything was basically overdubbed and that the musicians hadn’t played together on these songs! Very surprising, because everything sounds very together and nicely integrated. I think I mentioned this on one of the first Joni threads: I could swear that soon after Hejira was released, there was a long interview with Joni in Rolling Stone or some other publication, where she talked in detail about the trips and experiences that inspired the album. I’ve looked for that article many times, with no success. Does that ring a bell with anyone else? Does some link exist? If I’m not crazy and am not imagining this, it had a lot of great anecdotes and insights. I’d love to read it again. What a fantastic album, maybe my all time favorite by anyone. I really look forward to reading everyone’s comments and discussing the music. (In my subsequent posts I'll focus on the music, I promise.)
^^ It will be interesting to find out which two songs leave you "scratching your head". At present I can only name one song on Hejira that does not do much for me.
Interesting trivia: Hejira apparently was one of the last CDs Prince bought shortly before his death.
Hejira is an amazing album. It almost feels stupid to say it when her previous albums are so mature, but I feel that Hejira is her most “adult” album, almost to a fault. You could compare it to Kate Bush's 50 Words For Snow where (apart from the title song) the entire album has an internal quality, as though Bush is not singing to an audience any more but just ruminating over her own thoughts. Hejira has a similar quality: although it has at least one of her greatest songs she really isn't focused on the listener any more, she seems to be retreating into her head. The way that the songs are structured around associative flights (pun intended) of fancy that keep returning to their fixed refrains gives the entire album a feeling of being almost one long song. The cover image suits the album perfectly. The high contrast and her dispassionate facial expression gives her an otherworldy appearance, almost like an apotheosized cadaver. The fact the eye accepts it as a single image when in fact it's a collage of 14 photos is perfect for an album that has such an obsessive, single-minded feel. This isn't my favourite Joni Mitchell album by any means but it certainly has a claim to being her best, or “most perfect”.
...and if The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a summer album, and not only because of the title but also the subject matter, then Hejira is the very opposite; it speaks of the depths of winter. Also, maybe this seems a shallow comment since I am not native to North America and have only briefly visited, but to me it also looks and sounds like something a Canadian artist would produce, much more so than any other album of hers.
My favourite Joni album. My go to Joni. And a perfect excuse for me to put it on the turntable as i work tomorrow. I'll comment more then.
Perhaps. One thing that has always troubled me about "Coyote" is where that pronunciation of the word comes from? As a prairie girl, the word should be pronounced ky-oat, stress on the first syllable, silent 'e'. In the American southwest, it seems the animal is known as a kay-oot. Does anyone actually pronounce the 'e'? And stress the second syllable? I just looked up the origin of the word; apparently it is Natuahl (Aztec) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Coyotl.ogg and while the 'e' is pronounced softly, stress is on the first syllable. Still seems odd that a girl from the prairies would choose such an odd way to say the name.
This is how I tend to feel about much of Joni Mitchell's music. I admire it and I enjoy it but I rarely feel the need to analyse it. I find that her lyrics, particularly those on this album, tend to pop into my head at odd moments and in strange circumstances, making me ask 'Where the hell did that come from?' Coyote reminds me somewhat of Bowie's cut-up lyrical approach, though the purpose here is to describe a sensation rather than to tell a story - of being pursued by an aggressive, amoral man - and liking it! The 'finger pie' interpretation of the scent didn't occur to me - I guess I don't have that dirty a mind! Unlike C&S and HOSL, this is not a 'feel good' album: the backing is stark rather than reassuring. A lot of the time we're only aware of the guitar and the bass.
I can't really name a single favorite Joni album, but this would be in the top tier. However, it's also an album where I love most of the songs....and loathe one of them. (I'll refrain from additional comment until we get to the song by song discussion.)
Jaco overdubs on multiple Don Juan tracks (most notably on "Talk To Me" which has simultaneous bass parts at many points). I don't remember any overdubbed bass parts on Mingus.
Taking a long road trip with a paramour is a very effective way to see if there's really any there ... there. After many miles you get tired and/or relaxed, and the masks and facades start to slip. "Coyote" really captures that process.
