In honor of Joni Mitchell’s 70th birthday, this week’s CarTune is her composition “Coyote,” recorded live for the historic concert film The Last Waltz. 

The glass ceiling is still with us. For all her fame and recognition, Joni Mitchell is still vastly under-appreciated as a musician and songwriter. She is easily the equal of any of her male contemporaries, but decades later the audience is still catching up to her astonishing body of work: Blue, Court and Spark, Hejira, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, more. In her 1975 song “Coyote,” she created one of the great road metaphors in popular music:

You’re not a hit and run driver, no, no
Racing away
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

This live performance is from the seminal rock movie, The Last Waltz, which records The Band’s final concert. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen the film yet, you really should. The Band—Danko, Helm, Hudson, Manuel, Robertson—is absolutely on fire here, and Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and others turn in career-grade performances, but it’s Mitchell who steals a major segment of the show with this superior piece of song crafting. Watch and listen.