Picking Up a Hitcher

Song 384: This week on the playlist you can hear Coyote by Joni Mitchell, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it here. I became a big Joni Mitchell fan around the time For the Roses came along in 1972, to such an extent that I titled one of my tunes For the Flowers thanks to her inspiration, and by the time Hejira came along 4 years later, I quickly added it to my collection, which already included all of her other LPs. On this cut, which opens the album, she identifies herself as a prisoner of the white line on the freeway and a hitcher, which exactly matched my own songwriting lyrical self-image, so she had me hooked with this one before she got to the end of it. I could easily imagine the two of us riding thumb together, and I even wrote a love song to her (maybe more on that one day), but of course, if we had hitched as a couple, a Coyote driving by probably wouldn't have stopped to pick anyone up. On a random side note, this lyric was the first I had ever heard about the Bay of Fundy, and in that long-ago era before the internet, I don't recall how I did the research on it, but in doing so, I learned that it has the highest tidal range in the world, so listening to Joni widened my knowledge of the world as well as resonating with my traveling spirit.