Tortilla Soundtrack: "Coyote" by Joni Mitchell

After reading The Tortilla Curtain, Mr. Lewenstein asked us select a song to represent our reading.  He calls it our Tortilla Soundtrack.  We all looked into our musical archives.  I found this one  - "Coyote" - by Joni Mitchell.  Below I matched up lyrics with passages from the novel.

Joni Mitchell was once known as the Queen of the Canyon. She developed and refined much of her songwriting genius in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon in the Sixties. Who knows? That might not be too far away from The Tortilla Curtain’s Blanco Arroyo. Midway through the novel, I can hear Joni singing the perfect song in the background where America finds herself alone in the woods. In the shadows, America goes face to face with a wild coyote and doesn't budge. “There’s no comprehending…Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes…And the lips you can get..” sings Joni. “And feel so alone.” Joni knows something about surviving harsh realities. So does America. So I love the scene where America is sitting there all by herself in the shadows of the woods. It must be both frustrating and frightening . She’s tired and hungry and hurt, and she hears something but she doesn’t know what. It’s kind of like a dream, but it’s real – she’s staring face to face with a coyote. And instead of screaming or panicking, “she looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out…”