Written and released almost 50 years ago, Joni Mitchell's "Coyote" examines persona, affection, and - like the rest of her work - freedom. Not quite folk, pop, rock or jazz, it instead forays into its own poetic cartography of North America. It lasts as one of her most infamous and distinctive songs.

Hot off her seventh album, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," Mitchell was disillusioned. Critics and fans alike were jarred by the record's experimental palettes and commentaries, offering percussion from Burundi and portraits of suburbia on the same LP. On tour, her former sunny and witty Laurel Canyon front revealed a sullen, silent frontwoman. The chutzpah that defined her earlier benchmarks - "Blue," "Court and Spark" and "Ladies of the Canyon" - vanished. She was overly critical not only of her music, but of her own celebrity.

To escape these pressures, Mitchell took to the roads. Across flings, aliases and motel rooms, she composed many of the songs that would later culminate into her travelog "Hejira"­ - including "Coyote," the opener and lead single. It recounts her time with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, a ramshackle cast of Beats and ex-folkies eager to reinvent their artistry. Notably, it examines her brief yet electric relationship with playwright and Revue collaborator, Sam Shepard.

As soon as she utters that husky "no regrets, coyote," Mitchell departs from the sunny soft rock that tinged her previous handful of records. Instead, she turns her pen inward and intimate. Her hypnotic soprano is entirely absent; she opts to sing in plaintive alto melodies that verge on the spoken. In the first verse, she contrasts her exhaustion in the studio with this coyote's skittish ways, finding common ground in "racing away."

Of course, the liberation traveling provides also comes with a price. "Pills," "powders," "passion-play": Mitchell's alliteration here captures the fleeting pleasures inherent to wanderlust. She knows these vicious cycles and ugly truths surface between the diners and dive bars. Take her characterization of Shepard, for example: "now he's got a woman at home / he's got another woman down the hall / he seems to want me anyway." The final verse even remarks how he checks out their waitress over breakfast.

However, Mitchell isn't exempt from her songwriting's scrutiny. Borrowing from the social commentary so plentiful in her back catalog, she questions her own intentions with her refrain: "you just picked up a hitcher / a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway." Masterful in its juxtaposition, the lyrics here place nomadic freedom and drug abuse in the same breath. She doesn't "find herself" on these interstates like the standard travel narrative would suggest. Rather, she runs into herself - colliding with the force of a "farmhouse burning down" as she illustrates on the second verse.

While Mitchell's pen sketches images of her travels, the band acts as the vehicle that propels the listener from place to place. Jaco Pastorious' expansive, fretless bass pans to the vast expanses of America Mitchell found herself venturing with the Revue; slight percussion adds to the drive. Mitchell's strange chords are in full effect as well: because of an early case of polio, her stiff fingers required innovative and novel tunings. "Coyote" resists one moment of climax, coasting with a consistent, nearly hysterical momentum.

While it may be easy to qualify the song as jazz fusion, turn to its first recording featured in the Rolling Thunder Revue documentary. Gordon Lightfoot, another master of the Canadian folk scene, housed Mitchell and other Revue mainstays on the road. In his living room, Mitchell debuted "Coyote" for an audience of her predominantly male peers - notably, Dylan himself. His stoic side profile idly watches her nervous, gummy smile. Robert McGuinn, frontman of The Byrds, encourages Mitchell with an arm squeeze.

And here, she stuns. A semitone higher than the album version - and with even more conversational lyrics - Mitchell effortlessly jives with dissonance and grace. The room is all agog. She doesn't merely croon a standard at the mic or serve as an ornamental singer for the band. Rather, she commands the room with the force of a poet, spitting with acid composure.

A violin soars from the back of the jam. Mitchell's crow-like eyes dart between her guitar and the floor beneath her. Following her verses, the room continues to jam alongside her forceful strum. Even though "Coyote"'s five-minute runtime dashes by as feverishly as it begins, the song could stretch on forever - swerving on the lanes between tension and release, never quite settling.