Dylan’s many love songs

A great deal of Bob Dylan’s songs, hundreds of songs written over a 50-year period, deal with some aspect of love. The songs that most clearly address the topic of human love go through a relatively clear development – from songs parting with, rejecting and mocking ex-girlfriends, through mid-life songs about living together and marriage, to old age songs that, telling it like it is, express a pure disgust for carnal love. I will briefly summarise this timeline, before concentrating on the key album, Blood on the Tracks (1975).

 
Even though Dylan’s songs mostly deal with unhappy love, we can also find some examples of happy songs. “Lay, Lady, Lay” (1969) and “On a Night Like This” (1974) are such songs celebrating love, with the pastoral mood that characterises Dylan between 1967 and 1974, and they are neither elegiac laments nor ironically judgmental, but sensual and sexual. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (1968) and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” (1969), to mention a few more, are also happy, erotic ballads of expectation. Such songs take a departure from the young Dylan’s vagabonding pattern, which is all about taking off and hitting the road.

Some of the songs from his youth are elegiac, such as “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (1962), Dylan’s first great love song. Here, love is no longer simply treated as a traditional blues lament or in the form of a ballad. The epic has been replaced by impressionistic situations. “Girl from the North Country” (1963), Dylan’s first recorded love song, is also elegiac, but more nostalgic. It is also Dylan’s first example of the speaker communicating through a third party. “I Threw It All Away” (1969) is also elegiac, but more self-reproaching. The ”I” is blaming itself for throwing away happiness. In contrast to young Dylan’s songs about broken relationships, the ”I” here takes responsibility for the relationship going awry. “One Too Many Mornings” (1964) and “Mama, You Been on My Mind” (1964) are also elegiac, but are more characterised by self-reflection than self pity.

However, the majority of the love songs are anti-love songs: parting with, rejecting and pure diatribes. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (1963) is one of the first. The rejection in “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (1964) is even stronger, which turns love attraction into rejection – a turn Dylan quickly developed into a distinctive characteristic. The anti-love song is also suited to criticise ideological perceptions of love – in this case the romantic idea of everlasting love. Songs about break-ups, parting ways, and mocking rejection are plentiful, not least in the mid-60s. “Just Like a Woman” (1966) severely criticises an ex-girlfriend. Other examples include “Ballad in Plain D” (1964), “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), “Positively 4th Street” (1965) and “She’s Your Lover Now” (1966), songs that are dominated by veritable tirades of insults.

Cohabitation and marriage are the setting for the majority of Dylan’s songs from the 1970s. Several are happy, but the vagabonding urge returns in “Tough Mama” (1974). Biographically, the song can be interpreted as a declaration that he wants to return to the stage. “Dirge” (1974) is a more raging variant of the same pattern, and can also be interpreted allegorically as a farewell to the 1960s. I will return to Dylan’s mid-life songs about love when I discuss Blood on the Tracks, but first, I will complete the outer outline.

The older Dylan writes somewhat different love songs. In “Born in Time” (1990) the ”I” reminisces about a love relationship that still haunts him, but new elements have deepened the disillusion: extreme loneliness, ageing, and the inexorable passing of time, and time is exactly what this is about. There are still embers in the ashes, but the “I” cannot imagine getting back together and rejects carnal love: “Not one more night, not one more kiss/ Not this time baby, no more of this/ Takes too much skill, takes too much will/ It’s revealing.”

“Love Sick” (1997) goes: “I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it/ This kind of love I’m sick of it”. This aversion of love goes deeper than the early diatribes and the disillusioned mid-life songs about relationships and marriage, because these songs are contemptuous of the entire phenomenon of carnal love. It is just a grotesque desire, or as said in “Things Have Changed” (1999): “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie/ I’m in love with a woman who don’t even appeal to me.”

However, the love is not only between people, and the addressee in the Dylan songs can often be interpreted several ways: It can be an actual person, a thematic girlfriend figure, a transcendent dimension – a source of inspiration; a Muse – or transcendent figures such as Christ and God. Furthermore, the “you” in the lyrics can also be interpreted as the artist’s audience.



After his turbulent run as a rock innovator and touring artist, as well as the accident in 1966, Dylan withdrew, and with very few exceptions, eight years would pass before he set foot on a stage again. Several mediocre records were released, and some masterpieces: John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969). However, many believed Dylan was finished. Paul Williams wrote: 
 

His creative life could well have been behind him, as it was for so many of his contemporaries. Instead he succeeded, by tremendous efforts of will and through a demanding process of self-honesty, in finding a new and continuing creative ground for himself [...]. His is the rare story of an artist who overcame and continues to overcome the obstacle of great public attention in order to keep on with his real work (2004: xiv).

Because in 1974, Dylan was back with a vengeance. Along with the Band, he went on a big tour, “the biggest rock ‘n’ roll undertaking of all time” (Gill & Odegard: 13), which resulted in his first concert record in June of the same year, Before the Flood. While on tour, he released Planet Waves, which became his first best-selling album in the US. Mellers writes that the record shows “how much more difficult an ideal is marriage than revolution; and who, having grown up, could doubt that?” (1984: 177).

The next record, Blood on the Tracks, grew from the tour and Dylan’s marriage trouble, but it was also inspired by his studies with the 73-year old art teacher, Norman Raeben. In particular, Raeben seems to have influenced Dylan in two aspects: increased self-awareness and a deeper understanding of time. Gill & Odegard write: 

In particular, Raeben brought Dylan to a more fruitful understanding of time, enabling him to view narrative not in such strictly linear terms, but to telescope past, present, and future together to attain a more powerful, unified focus on the matter at hand. [...] rather in the manner of montaged jump cuts in a movie, or in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo [...] (2005: 39).

The tour and Planet Waves were hailed as Dylan’s “Grand Return”, but the new masterpiece was Blood on the Tracks. Wilfrid Mellers writes: “In Planet Waves Dylan had returned, after his country dream, to the reality of love, no longer evading its complexities. In that album love is his positive value, while in Blood on the Tracks merely human (sexual) love proves inadequate, its rewards illusory” (1984: 184).

This is a concise summary of how Dylan’s love songs developed in the mid-1970s. This departure from a pastoral belief in (everlasting) human love to a more disillusioned view that can no longer ignore the temporary nature of all human love – and which thus realises the need for other and higher perceptions of love (music and religious) – has a long and great future with Dylan: the Christian conversion and late production’s cynical and playful distrust of and heartfelt disgust for human love. My belief is that Blood on the Tracks has a key-role in creating this change.



Dylan wrote the songs during the summer of 1974 at his farm in Minnesota and recorded them during one week in September in New York, along with Eric Weissberg and the band Deliverance. The recording strategy was also new. The old “take it as it comes” attitude was gone. Blood on the Tracks is one of Dylan’s most meticulous productions. Everything was ready for the release, but Dylan hesitated. During the Christmas holiday, at home with his brother David Zimmerman, he was told the record was not commercial, not radio-friendly, and that the songs were too depressing for listeners. Dylan asked the company to stop production, decided to get back to work on some songs, gathered some musicians, and re-recorded five of the ten songs in Minneapolis during the Christmas holidays.

Blood on the Tracks is therefore available in two versions: the New York tracks and the five newly recorded tracks. The album’s “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Meet Me in the Morning”, “Shelter from the Storm”, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and “Buckets of Rain” are from New York. The re-recorded songs are: “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Idiot Wind” and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” – as well as the two songs which most clearly deal with the spouse – “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello”. This indicates that at least part of the motive for re-recording was that the first texts were considered to be too personal. This was moderated in Minneapolis, while also making the music livelier.

Now, most critics believe that Dylan did the right thing by replacing five of the New York tracks with the new ones. This specially applies to “Tangled Up in Blue”, which was moved from E major to A major by mere coincidence, and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”. Clinton Heylin is nearly alone in believing that Dylan chickened out by re-writing and re-recording, but he too admits that the two mentioned songs were improved in Minneapolis.

The record was released on 17 January 1975, and only a few weeks later, all five “outtakes” from New York were available on the bootleg album Joaquin Antique. Later on, the New York version of “You’re a Big Girl Now” was released on Dylan’s Biograph (1985).



Blood on the Tracks was Dylan’s second number one album in approximately one year, went gold (half a million) only three weeks after the release, and became the fastest and bestselling Dylan record to date. Maybe the commercial success caused critics to change their minds, because the first reviews were not exactly glowing. However, Paul Williams, a critic for Soho News, was impressed with Dylan’s singing: 

Where is there anyone around today who can sing half this well? [...] Any fool can think, and most can write; delivering those thoughts intact to another mind, another consciousness, is the extraordinary talent ... Every word on this record is a hundred times bigger because of the awareness and skill with which it is spoken (Cited in Gill & Odegard: 175-76).

The significance of the album was understood by Michael Gray in Let It Rock. Gray has subsequently expounded upon his view: “After years of comparatively second-rate work and a considerable decline in his reputation, here was an album to stand with Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde” (2006: 59). Blood on the Tracks is the best record from the 1970s: 

When it was first released, in 1975, its effect was colossal. An adjustment was needed, critically, to the fact that Dylan had so dramatically broken free of the decade with which he was deeply associated by virtue of having so profoundly affected it. [...] The common conception of how rock music moves forward needed to be adjusted too. That conception had always been that artists come and go in relatively short time-spans, with careers peaking early. Blood on the Tracks challenged that idea. Here was a masterpiece fully ten years after Dylan’s first major ‘peak’, Highway 61 Revisited – and one as different and as fresh as it possibly could have been (Gray 2006: 60).

Subsequent opinions have mostly concurred. If any Dylan record deserves to be singled out as a masterpiece, this is the one (Williams: 21). Blood on the Tracks re-established Dylan’s position as rock royalty (Riley: 232). Heylin calls the record “perhaps the finest collection of love songs of the twentieth century” (2001: 372), and Andy Gill & Kevin Odegard speak of “the most moving, bittersweet collection of songs about love and art and pain ever committed to tape” (2005: 15). Derek Barker calls the record “one of the finest record albums of all time and certainly the best album of the 1970s” (2005: 159), and Anthony Varesi writes that the record “is an astonishing work of art” that has an “emotional force unprecedented for a music album” (2002: 118). Mellers writes: “Together, Dylan’s words and music have an immediacy compared with which a Kerouac or a Ginsberg seem merely to write ‘about’ a generation, not to be it” (1984: 179).



Thematically, the songs deal with time and timelessness: the past existing in the present, and the insistence on everlasting love between the sexes is gone. A wide spectrum of emotions are communicated, but abandonment might be the main characteristic, writes Larry David Smith. The women in the songs have many traits, but the main feature is the salvation they offer: “They represent nothing less than the Face of God – a God that is wrathful, evasive, merciless, redeeming, and, most of all, challenging” (Smith: 210).

Most commentators insist the songs are highly autobiographical. Gill & Odegard write that they are the results of the failing marriage, and that in 1974, Dylan set a new standard “for confessional song writing, with an album whose personal revelations would remain half-hidden behind a screen of fiction [...] allegories, and shifting time scales” (2005: 28). Several also point out that in 1974, Dylan had an affair with Ellen Bernstein, an employee at Columbia Records, who visited him at his farm in Minnesota where he wrote the songs, and that she might be the model for the “you” in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”. Dylan has said that he does not write “confessional songs” (The Biograph-booklet 1985: 51), but Williamson believes that “there’s no other way of describing Blood on the Tracks” (2004: 220).

However, there are exceptions. Riley writes: “The most banal way to read Dylan songs is to link them up with his life, as though he had no greater ambition than to record his autobiography [...].” (1999: 218.) Varesi agrees with Riley, as does Smith.

David Boucher has pointed out that there is a strong tendency in the Dylan research to either look for referents in the texts or to interpret the songs as emotional expressions. The search for referents pursues two different avenues; either looking for people, places and objects, or searching for musical and literary influences. Both approaches presume that the more you know about what a song is refering to, the better you understand it, but both approaches are problematic. The search for people and other things is shallow and the search for influences in endless.

The emotional approach does not interpret the words in the songs as being messages, but images that move us emotionally regardless of the word’s assertion and potential biographical roots. Boucher calls this an inspirational approach. Poetry is not primarily understood, but received: “You do not ask of the images whether they are fact or not fact. They are not propositions about the world to which truth and falsity are applicable; they are images to be delighted in” (2005: 159).

And it must be something like this that happened, because how else can a cycle of songs, that many believe is so autobiographical to be strictly private, become the most important album of the 1970s? Dylan’s emotional content is also interpreted allegorically, as a grand metaphor for societal developments. Riley goes the farthest in this direction. He interprets the record as the 1970s divorcing its ex, the 1960s. In the mid-70s, the optimism and rebellious spirit of the 1960s is broken down, and an economic downturn and President Nixon’s ignominious resignation (August 1974) colour the times. And rock’s innovators from the 60s have become middle-aged. Riley writes: 

Dylan opens a vein of the sixties that finds middle age something of an anomaly to youth culture, and the triumph isn’t that he has the poet’s inclination to shake down the passing youth that everybody else was only too willing to deny, but that he has the poet’s courage to embrace it, and turn what had been denial into hard-won wisdom (1999: 231).

With this as a backdrop, it becomes easier to understand that what might have started as an autobiographically influenced song cycle could get such great resonse and end up as speaking on behalf of so many.



The lyrics of the songs are highly valued. Håvard Rem writes: “The album represents a poetic high-water mark in Dylan’s production as well as this century’s songwriting” (2005: 113). Gray believes that the language stands for a modern simplicity that Dylan had strived for since John Wesley Harding, and like this record – and Highway 61 Revisited – these songs also do not have proper choruses, they only have refrains, and the surrealistic style from ten years back is gone (2006: 60). Smith says that “the detail that flows from this writing is downright shocking. This is a masterpiece of topical song-writing – and that topic is love”, and continues: “The practice of songwriting does not get much better than this” (2005: 195). For simplicity is, as is often the case with Dylan, deceitful because it, as Gray writes, says more by having the confidence to say less (2006: 60).

This is where Dylan also presents his first “story-telling songs, long novella-like texts [...], a form of epic poetry that is without an equal in modern poetry, both written and spoken. The stories are somewhat epic, and not with surrealistic scenes such as in 1965-66, but they are told with the same aphoristic accuracy in the dialogues and hallucinating richness of imagery [...]” (Rem: 112-13).

The texts are not without literary illusions. The French symbolists Verlaine and Rimbaud appear in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, and “Tangled Up in Blue” mentions “an Italian poet from the thirteenth century”. Jesus Christ is also an explicit reference – in both “Idiot Wind” and “Shelter from the Storm”. Gray writes that this is where Dylan’s identification with Christ actually begins (2004: 211). Wolfram Ette points to an important implicit literary reference: Francesco Petrarch and his Canzoniere (1374), the most important book in European poetry, where earthly, mortal love through a loved one’s death is eternally transfigured to transcendent love. For Ette, Blood on the Tracks is a petrarchan album, even though the song’s petrarchism is secular in nature. In the place of religious transcendence are earthly imaginations with a similar function (Ette 2007: 44).

All of the songs are about women, and all, apart from perhaps “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, are about love, and they touch upon a wide range of emotions, apart from one, as Smith writes, namely “the joy that accompanies a successful relationship” (2005: 207). The critics point to the fine balance between songs that directly speak lyrically, and songs that are narrative fictions, most clearly “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”; but also “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Shelter from the Storm” and “Idiot Wind” have fictional elements that alternate with direct speech. Several also point to the successful sequencing, the order of the songs lets different states of mind collide and comment on each other.

The most direct songs are “You’re a Big Girl Now”, “If You See Her, Say Hello” and to a lesser degree “Simple Twist of Fate”. I will comment on these three elegies first – and least. Other songs are more narrative, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, “Idiot Wind”, “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Shelter from the Storm”. Some of these are narrative in non-linear ways, and I will discuss them afterwards, along with the songs’ music aspects. Finally, I will address the least analysed and seemingly most insignificant songs: “Buckets of Rain”, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and “Meet Me in the Morning”, to say something about the eventual death of the loved one and the petrarchan aspect of the album.



“Simple Twist of Fate” is about lost love – of the type “two ships passing in the night” (cf. Trager 2004: 562). Afterwards, the man looks for the woman who disappeared after a few hours of togetherness. Who is she? Some (Heylin, Barker) believe she is Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s former girlfriend. In the draft, the song had the sub-title “Fourth Street Affair”: Dylan and Suze lived in Fourth Street in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Or, is she a more recent girlfriend, possibly a one-night stand? This is what Mellers, Varesi and Gill & Odegard believe. Or a prostitute, as Riley claims?

Most people interpret the third person form as a projected first person form, not least because the final stanza is in the first person (an “I” also makes an appearance in stanza 2). However, Smith believes the song is about another man’s encounter with a prostitute. The final stanza has a first person form because the story about the other man highlights the first person’s own situation. I believe this to be a misinterpretation.

Stanza 1 portrays the couple in a scene at dusk. Even though she takes his hand and he “felt a spark tingle to his bones”, the line “then he felt alone” follows. His loneliness, even before she disappears, lends the song an air of severe desolation. Gill & Odegard write: 

Although the song can be read simply as an account of a doomed one-night stand, on another level it suggests why, perhaps, the couple were unable to connect more deeply. As so often on Blood on the Tracks, it’s down to the conflict between art and life within the artist’s life, the way that the artist’s detached, observational imperative inevitably impairs his or her ability to foster relationships (2005: 150-51).

His desolation not only applies to the external fact that she is gone, but equally to the fact that he realises his introverted nature has doomed him to isolation. As sung in the final stanza: “People tell me it’s a sin/ To know and feel too much within”. In this perspective, it is also about the conflictual needs of a person and an artist, and about the solitude of the artist.

***

“You’re a Big Girl Now” is also an elegy about lost love. Most believe the song is about Sara, but Dylan himself is very critical of this interpretation. 

[...] well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are. [...] I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It only seems so, like it seems that Laurence Olivier is Hamlet [...] (Biograph-booklet 1985: 51-52).

The song is directed to an ex-girlfriend who has moved on and perhaps become more independent than the speaker of the song. It opens with the ”I” shockingly realising the defeat. He is “out in the rain”, and rain is a recurring metaphor on the record. He is self-pitying, but not completely without hope. However, the stanzas unfold systematically from separation to a steadily more desperate insight into the uselessness of hoping to be reunited, and in the middle of the text arrives the unconvincing line “I can change, I swear”, which forms the basis for the further feeling of emptiness that follows.

***

Several critics point to how the elegiac ballad “If You See Her, Say Hello” is reminiscent of “Girl from the North Country”, by turning to a lost love via a confidant or rival. The song is intensely sorrowful and sad, and somewhat bitter, but accepts the separation. At least, the “I” tries to seem chivalrous, even though chivalry, as many have pointed out, might be a defence mechanism. However, the power of the song lies in the ability to show weakness and vulnerability, something the young Dylan rarely permitted himself to do.
Smith correctly makes reference to how the song, like “Idiot Wind”, begins in one place (the first person asks the confidant not to reveal his true feelings) and ends in another (the first person would like her to visit him again) (Smith: 107). Dylan has subsequently often re-written the text – mostly in a more vulgar direction. The speaker starts praying to the Lord for the strength to resist her, if she should return.



The Country ballad “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” should, by all tokens, have been a boring song, Williams writes; nine minutes long, three chords (D G A), the same melody through 15 stanzas (16 in text and in the New York recording), however,: “Enter the Minneapolis miracle. The take of ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ that does appear on Blood on the Tracks is a completely different animal, lilting, energetic, so much fun it’s irresistible [...]” (2004: 33).
The text is epic and theatrical, less emotionally involved than the others, and the song belongs with Dylan’s satirical songs. In contrast to “Tangled Up in Blue”, for instance, this is a relatively straight-forward and linear narrative, however, an ellipsis between stanza 9 and 10 helps lend the text dramatic irony: We know more than the figures in the story, and to mystify the plot: “Did Jack get shot, or did he escape? Did Rosemary stab Jim because he shot Jack?” (Smith 2005: 201).

The song is performed with a typical deadpan, with a voice that reveals nothing. All commentators believe the song stands out and foreshadows the next album, Desire, by being a story-song based on Western film mythology. However, it is also retrospective as regards both “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” (1968) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

All the figures in this story about shady relationships, love triangles and deceit, have a hidden agenda, and they and their respective roles are systematically presented in the narrative. It is not about love according to Smith, but rather the figures using each other in the quest for love’s false promises. In the end, we jump forward in time to the next day: Jim has been murdered by Rosemary, who will soon hang. Jack is gone and Lily, the cabaret artist, reflects over her life. There are tragic aspects to Rosemary’s fate. We could discuss potential catharsis in Lily’s fate, but all in all, the theme is, as Smith says, deceit and self-deception – in life in general and particularly in romantic relationships. Allegoric understanding is also included. Riley (1999: 240) believes that this farce is a mirror for the decorative surface of the Sixties. All the characters are so concerned with romantic intrigue that they overlook the drilling in the wall. The same can be said about the 1960s – the optimism was blind to the deeper historical developments.

***

On paper “Idiot Wind” seems regular and orderly, however, the song is full of unexpected turns and has a more non-linear form. This song went though the most changes during the recording period, and it is the album’s only raging, perhaps also malicious, song – a diatribe like Dylan’s stinging songs from the 1960s: “Ballad in Plain D”, “Positively 4h Street”, “Desolation Row” etc.
But who or what is the rage directed at? The ”you” of the text seems to be very complex. One component is Sara Dylan, but other people are also involved: copycat artists (cf. the New York version), and stanza 4 alludes to Roger McGuinn’s great song “Chestnut Mare” (1970). Perhaps Dylan’s former manager Albert Grossman is also a target, and clearly the gossip columns in the press. The “I” is also exposed to his own rage, and in the widest sense, the entire society and spirit of the times.

The title seems to have two sources: 1) The words in Macbeth about life being “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound of fury,/ Signifying nothing” (act 5, scene 5), and 2) Norman Raeben, who is remembered for the expression “an idiot wind blowing and blinding all human existence” (Williamson: 289). The idiot wind is the totality of relationships and phenomena that attack our integrity, Gray writes (2006: 60). Several critics (Mellers, Riley, Heylin) highlight the allegorical, that the song is both private and public and targets the Watergate zeitgeist like no other songs (Riley: 231).



“Tangled Up in Blue” is the most discussed song on the record. Critics love the song according to James Dunlap because it is a perfect example of Dylan’s rich nuances and complexity, and because it is open to different interpretations (2005: 190). Aiden Day claims the narrative behaves more like a montage than a logical order of events (1989: 52). It is still possible to reconstruct one story, about the speaker’s past relationship and the wanderings after the collapse of the relationship. Interpreted as such, the song’s “she” refers to one person, the lost love the speaker wishes to recover at the end of the song. Day makes a whole-hearted effort to reconstruct this one story. Dunlap and Smith do the same. The chronology is unclear, but we can solve part of the puzzle by altering the order of the stanzas, but not quite all of it.

As it is, the ”she” in stanzas 1,2,4 and 5 can hardly be considered to be the same figure. In the first recording, Dylan sang “he” in the first stanzas before switching to “I” in stanza 4, and in later performances through several decades he has continued to rewrite the text, not least through pronoun changes. The record version is a pretty straightforward first person story, but “them” and “he” in stanza 6 create turbulence.

Thus, interpreting the song is not easy. Is it only describing one relationship? Or one man’s relationship to many women? The latter is most likely, and most end up here; but some believe the song is about a single woman, preferably the redhead from stanza 1. This one, or the several broken relationships can also be read as an allegory for greater political and historical changes. The song’s episodic and non-linear narrative illustrates the journey of a whole generation. (Gill & Odegard: 145-46). In 1985, Dylan said the following about the song: 

I was trying to do something that I didn’t think had ever been done before. [...] I was trying to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images. I was trying to do it in a conscious way. I used to be able to do it in an unconscious way [...]. I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time (quoted by Heylin 2001: 370).

Dylan compares the song with a painting, and it is clear that time as a sequence loses importance. However, when taking a closer look, time itself is the main subject of non-linear narratives. Gray also highlights the non-linear by referencing Aiden Day’s and Neil Corcoran’s post-structuralist readings, where the song becomes an allegory for its own performance: It not only says to “keep on keeping on”, but does so as well, and prefers process over finished result, performance over publication (Gray 2006: 650).

Another problem is the “you” and the poet in stanza 5. The sudden occurrence of a “you” conflicts with the form of the text so far. For Day, this direct reference becomes an arrow in the direction of an archetypal female figure, that is addressed, not as a memory, but as being present. The fact that this takes place in connection with “an Italian poet/ From the thirteenth century”, is completely in its place. Most believe the poet to be Dante. In his works, Beatrice represents a concentration of the poet’s intellectual life, and this indicates that the “you” can be understood as a reference to the Muse. However, Barker believes Petrarch is a better suggestion: “In his March 12, 1978 interview with Craig McGregor Dylan said ‘....Yeah that poet from the 13th century...Plutarch. Is that his name?’” (2005: 181). Would Dylan mix Plutarch and Dante? Barker asks. Not likely, because the names do not sound the same, but Plutarch and Petrarch do, and as we have heard from Wolfram Ette, Blood on the Tracks is a petrarchan album.

Stanza 6 was significantly improved upon in Minneapolis, but the line “He started into dealing with slaves” has caused problems. It is interpreted as a reference to drug abuse: “This [...] is about as close as Dylan ever gets to acknowledging that he had some substance abuse problems and that they might have been a factor in his marital difficulties” (Williams: 37). Dunlap also provides an allegoric interpretation; those who commit to the music industry like Dylan did through Grossman. This explains the lines “And when finally the bottom fell out/ I became withdrawn”: He lost contact with inspiration (Dunlap: 195). However, Smith correctly stresses that it is not the “I”, but the triangle’s “he” who deals with slaves. (2005: 202).

Because the primary problem in stanza 6 is ”them” and ”he”, which makes it difficult to adapt the storytelling into one story, even though we accept that the ”I” talks about himself in the third person. Day’s suggested interpretation here is that the “I” addresses his former self as “he” and “them” becomes him and his girlfriend back then (Day: 57), however, Dunlap believes the “I” here is the creative Muse who hides behind all the “she”s in the song, who lived with “them”, i.e. “Bob and Sara” (2005: 194). Regardless, this separation is not in accordance with the separation in e.g. stanza 2, only the formula is the same. Relationships dissolve.



Such an interpretation solves many problems, but not all, because the text also has a unifying effect, which comes from the pattern the lost love. The woman in this pattern connotes a soul mate, who the speaker is seeking, but can never quite reach. She therefore becomes an ideal for his search for his own identity. The text’s disturbance of narrative order becomes a search for something beyond such order, Day writes (1989: 60), and is accompanied by Dunlap: “The object of Dylan’s search in the song [...] is revealed as the once-known, now-elusive source of his creative expression” (2005: 193). He also writes: “In the course of the song, the snapshot images of women, real or imagined, become multi-faceted aspects of a single muse that exists, dream-like, as a continuous thread throughout Dylan’s life, like Dante’s Beatrice” (2005: 194).

Day quotes some interesting words by Dylan himself: “We allow our past to exist. Our credibility is based on our past. But deep in our soul we have no past” (1989: 61). This sheds light on the ending of the song. The quest for the ideal woman, the Muse, is a never-ending journey, an allegory for the singer’s continuous quest for inspiration. Neither the ”I” nor the text can have any clear understanding of this one, ideal woman, Day claims. The “she” of the text is therefore unattainable, but always something to strive for.

In the article “Planet Waves: Dylan’s Symposium”, Doug Anderson analyses the record which was released before Blood on the Tracks, based on Plato’s dialogue about the essence of love. He writes: “Love in its highest form is [...] a desire or passion for truth and beauty that transcends our immediate life experience. It is an erotic desire for the unattainable” (2006: 4). Symposium describes the love – from physical attraction to intellectual and spiritual desire. Every speaker in the dialogue is outdone by the next, and Socrates, the last, moves from human to divine love. The object of love is not people, but the immortal ideas. This highest form of love is philosophical Eros, where we seek the truth we can never quite attain.

According to Anderson, Dylan sings about a similar ascent, from youthful infatuation, through adult Eros and sexual desire, “true love” – true complementary love – and agape: protective love – for example the love a father has for his son – to love of one’s own work. Dylan’s highest Eros does not apply to the persons in his songs, but the performances themselves. As the songs have a duration that even true love between the sexes lack, they can transcend a lifetime, a generation and an epoch. As Diotima taught Socrates in Symposion: The object of love is immortality. This highest form of love does not apply to people, but to a life form. This also seems to be the case with Dylan, his love primarily applies to the immortality of songs.



Then we arrive at a song which deals with this, but contrary to “Tangled Up in Blue”, rejects woman as a Muse, namely “Shelter from the Storm”. The title makes reference to Isaiah 32.2. Other expressions, such as “hilltop village”, an allusion to Jerusalem, “gambling for my clothes” and “I offered up my innocence” also refers to several parts of the Bible (Gilmour 2004: 116).

Several believe this song is the climax of the record (Smith, Ette), because it highlights an aspect of the lost love that is missing in the others: the story leading up to the break-up and the separation. Ette writes that no other song is so autobiographical, and none other have such an unreserved expression of the phase that started with the motorcycle accident, and of the redeeming significance Sara must have had for him at that time after the exhaustion in the mid-Sixties, while it also points to the Christ-like self-sacrifice (Ette 2007: 45). Many believe that this is the real conclusion of the record, where the first person of the song accepts loneliness and isolation as a necessary price to pay from being seduced by love’s illusions.

This elegiac ballad has a partially non-linear narrative. It is about a wounded man, who, following a series of accidents (stanza 4) associated himself with Christ’s sufferings, was saved, found shelter, but then it went awry (stanza 6). There is a change of tense here: “Now there’s a wall between us, somethin’ there’s been lost/ I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.” He regrets his superficial attitude towards unconditional love and care. This became his downfall, and the fall is illustrated in the last stanzas. Or – maybe he actually liberated himself?

The song opens with a use of language that is reminiscent of fairy tales, “‘Twas in another lifetime”, and the ”I” looks back at a period characterised by chaos and formlessness, is loyal to the woman’s intervention and the harbour she offered. But the refuge was not without its difficulties: “Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved./ Everything up to that point had been left unresolved” (stanza 3). The “I” takes his part of the blame for the disintegration of the relationship. He took too much for granted, he still has feelings for her, but has another purpose: He is chasing beauty.

There are melodramatic elements here, and the romantisation of the woman is extreme. The song is also a parable of the frailty of faith and the importance of still believing. After the change of tense in stanza 6, it only goes downhill, with crying children, a mourning dove and the Wild West Trinity; deputy, preacher and undertaker (Gill & Odegard: 163). He is naked and lost like Jesus, his clothes are being gambled for, but he can still express sympathy for others that must live without love (stanza 8); in stanza 9, however, the hopelessness is nearly all-encompassing.

Apart from “Idiot Wind”, this is the angriest stanza of the record, but the printed text is not identical with what he sings. He sings “I bargained for salvation./ And she (not they) gave me a lethal dose”. But on Hard Rain (1976) and Budokan (1979), Dylan sings “they gave me”. This influences the understanding of his attitude towards the protection she offered. If she gave him a lethal dose, the song is a clear rejection of what she can offer, but if they gave him the dose, the rejection goes more in the direction of the audience and the public sphere.

The speaker compares his sufferings with those of Christ, and this trait, as we remember from “Idiot Wind”, became more common with Dylan in the time following. Mellers stresses that the “I” cannot capitulate to this woman: 

Trapped by his patriarchal heritage, he can envisage submission only “in another lifetime”. He ungrammatically admits that he cannot “turn back the clock to when (a pre-Christian) God and her were born”; identifying himself with the Christ, a (modern) man in whom God became incarnate, he wants back the crown of thorns which he had allowed the woman to relieve him of (1984: 183).

Had he accepted the refuge she could offer him, he would have escaped the responsibility. This foreshadows Dylan’s later development: Christ is the only valid salvation.

The end is about the goal: “Well, I’m living in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line/ Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine” (stanza 10). A transgression that can erase the distinctions is outside the text according to Day (1989: 68). The transition is pushed into the future, but that is what is being strived for, and such a beauty, which walks along the edge of a razor, cannot be cut or split.

Is the female figure Music or anti-Music, a source of inspiration or someone who impedes inspiration? Most likely the latter. The first five stanzas look back on a time when the “I” found refuge, and justify why he took refuge, while the last five illustrate a painful present and a future free from her suppressive effect. On Budokan, stanza 6 is left out. On Hard Rain it is the penultimate stanza.

The many Bible references also give the woman a God-like status, she becomes a personal Messiah, a false saviour. She fails him, because she offers an idyllic and false refuge from what is important and real. The promised haven turns out to be an illusion. The belief in the ideal remains, but only because it changes from idyllic love of the woman to artistic love of beauty. This is not quite the same as Petrarch’s eternity, Ette writes, but it is a replacement that does not need to shrink away from being compared with the pattern (2007: 46).



Petrarchism entails that a dead loved one is passionately made into a transcendent image. We will see that there are attempts at this in the album’s three least analysed songs. All are elegies, and one of them is a classic blues lament, while they all seem to deal with death, and all are mysterious.

The last song on the record, the humorous and somewhat nonsensical “Buckets of Rain”, is a song about being in love. According to Gray, the song has a blues structure and influence. When Dylan sings: “Little red wagon, little red bike” (stanza 4), he places himself in the blues genre, and: “In a genre so riddled with sexual innuendo and double entendre as the blues, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery or the porn shop, and this is a good example” (Gray 2006: 102).

Varesi points out that “Little red wagon” is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (2002: 126), while Gray notes that an avid Dylan collector has found that the expression “little red bike” is a blues expression for anal sex. However, it is not a normal expression, Gray writes: 

[...] there isn’t a single “little red wagon” in Michael Taft’s Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance. “Little red wagon” is, however, a recording by the pre-war blues artist Georgia White, and by a happy coincidence the very next track she laid down at the same session is called “Dan the Back Door Man”. [...] The Georgia White song would suggest that the phrase “that’s your (little) red wagon” means “that’s your preoccupation, not mine” [...] (2006: 102).

Several have also highlighted how appropriate it is to finish a record about pain, anger and rage, with this song. Because it provides a different positive ending than “Shelter from the Storm” would have, a new start characterised by dignity and perseverance. The song is placatory and capable of resistance, but not devoid of pain.

Stanza 2 accepts the transitory aspects of human relationships: “Friends will arrive, friends will disappear.” Stanza 3 says that he admires everything about her, but it only leads to misery: “Like your smile/ And your fingertips/ Like the way that you move your lips/ I like the cool way you look at me/ Everything about you is bringing me/ Misery.” And the moral is drawn in the final stanza: “Life is sad/ Life is a bust/ All ya can do is do what you must” (stanza 5).

However the most crucial, and a parallel to the final song on the first side of the record, is the end of stanza 4: “I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,/ When I go”. This is at least a fervent admiration of her, whether she is being perceived as a carnal girlfriend or a Muse – if ”go” is interpreted literally as the first person stops singing the song, but it can also be perceived as a promise to take her with him when he departs for the last time (“go” interpreted figuratively as dying).

***

In “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, which concludes the first side of the record, however, the woman might be the one dying. This is seemingly a light and noncommittal love song, but “a closer examination will reveal that this is in fact a quite wonderful ditty with some very clever lyrics” (Barker: 185). The text is yet another triumph for Dylan’s simplistic language, and the vagabonding pattern here is yet again turned on its head: She leaves him. The song is connected with, as said, Ellen Bernstein. The final stanza mentions her hometown, Ashtabula in Ohio, and her homes in San Francisco and Honolulu. There is also a reference in stanza 3 to Queen Anne’s lace, a plant she supposedly pointed out to Dylan in the fields on his farm in Minnesota (Gill & Odegard: 158).

The song is pastoral. There is no anger and contempt, but summer tranquillity. It starts with: “I’ve seen love go by my door/ It’s never been this close before”, and stanza 3informs that the speaker has previously only known “careless love”, but this time it is “more correct/ Right on target, so direct”. “Love is surely in the house,” writes Smith (2005: 206); but what does the turbulent relationship between the French symbolists, the teenager Arthur Rimbaud and his older mentor Paul Verlaine have to do in this idyll?

David Boucher tests the allusion. Generally, it is self-explanatory. We understand that the relationship wasn’t happy, even though we do not know anything about the two poets. But if we look at the details, it makes us ask more questions than we can answer: 

[...] for example, who in this relation does Dylan identify with? The older Verlaine or the younger, dominant Rimbaud? [...]. Their relationship in Paris, London, and Brussels was intermittent between 1871 and 1873, when Verlaine was imprisoned for attempted manslaughter after shooting Rimbaud in the wrist and trying to prevent him from leaving Brussels (Boucher 2005: 148).

No, we cannot answer all the questions, nor can the song: “But there’s no way I can compare/ All those scenes to this affair” (stanza 5), but the allusion says that there is great sorrow at the core of the song.

Future separation is foreshadowed. Or is her death foreshadowed? Information from Gray that a version of Shawn Colvin “strongly evokes a sense that the person going is departing this life altogether” (2006: 61), is an important hint. The song is more likely than not about the “you”’s (foreshadowed or expected) death, because the last bridge says: “Yer gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’,/ Stayin’ far behind without you.” This makes the song petrarchan, even though the transcendence appears earthly and pastoral in the final stanza: “But I’ll se you in the sky above,/ In the tall grass, in the ones I love,/ Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.” Even when she is dead, she lives on in the gaze of the speaker, in the high (“sky above”), low (“the tall grass”) and in the human middle realm (“the ones I love”). She thus lives on in both heaven and earth, outside and inside, in nature and in human caring and love. It is thus not unwarranted to call her transcendent.

***

There is at least one blues song on all Dylan records, and the blues in Blood on the Tracks is “Meet Me in the Morning”. A meeting in itself is somewhat more positive than longing, but as Mellers writes, it is typical Dylan that the possibility for a meeting does not make for a happy song: 

This is [...] a strict, very black twelve-bar blues, with strangled vocal production and a plethora of distonated false relations [...]. Both vocal and instrumental style soberly recall neurotic Robert Johnson, so it is not surprising that the song gives little promise of a hopeful resolution [...]. Presumably the girl won’t turn up (1984: 181-82).

Why doesn’t she show up? Stanza 2 (only 5 of the 6 stanzas are performed) says: “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn/ But you wouldn’t know it by me/ Every day’s been darkness since you been gone.” Is she dead (literally) and “gone” (figuratively)? Has her absence, and eventual death, also killed the “I”?

The final stanza goes: “Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship/ Ain’t that just like my heart, babe/ When you kissed my lips?” Is it punch-drunk love – as the cliché goes by erasing the difference between the figurative (being in love till death) and the literal (being in love with death and the dead)? Was it a kiss of death? Did it figuratively lead to the wrecking of the heart, to life-long longing, and literally to existential downfall? Precise answers cannot be found, because the lyrical language is compact and can be interpreted in several ways.



If we go 20 years forward in time, we can find an interesting re-appearance of the shipwreck metaphor. “Mississippi” was written for Time Out of Mind (1997), but was first released on Love and Theft (2001). It is a classic ballad, but, as is often the case with Dylan, the ballad is not particularly epic. It is, however, discontinuous and episodic – and mixed with solid doses of self-reflection and striking aphorisms. It is a song about anger and disappointment, about mortality (“Your days are numbered, so are mine”, stanza 1) and romantic obsession. The “I” has, following unspecified love troubles, stayed in Mississippi for one day – figuratively: a whole life – too long.

All of life’s and desire’s expectations have not only not happened, but are proven to be inadequate, and the result is existential bankruptcy.: “Got nothing for you, I had nothing before/ Don’t even have anything for myself anymore” (stanza 3). There are still embers in love’s, or more specifically; desire’s fire: “I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said/ I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed” (stanza 5), but the anger and self-reproach is stronger.

The love is obviously not only over, but might have happened way back in time, because the present is empty and void. There is nothing pastoral left – other than a severe contempt for city life. But the Music persists: “All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime/ Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme” (stanza 4). It is literally poetic humility, almost giving up, but figuratively it is as Music as ever with Dylan. The petrarchan might also be intact, because Rosie could be dead. The end of stanza 7 says: “I need somethin’ strong to distract my mind/ I’m gonna look at you ’til my eyes go blind.”

The performative highlight arrives in the middle of the song, at the end of stanza 6 and the beginning of stanza 7: “So many things that we never will undo/ I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too// Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t/ Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t.” Both inter-human and music disappointment, anger and resignation, are expressed in these lines.

The last five stanzas are more retrospective, and the shipwreck occurs in stanza 9: “Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast/ I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past”. This is reminiscent of the perception of time that characterises Blood on the Tracks, but the tender words that complete the stanza, “But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free/ I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me,” seem to contradict the metaphor (and “Meet Me in the Morning”). The existential ship is sinking, but not the heart. The heart, on the other hand, is light and free, and this contradicts both the song’s story and overall mood so strikingly that it calls for another interpretation than the story-related.

It might be most reasonable to interpret these words as directed at the audience (those who have sailed with him), which he still loves, and in light of this we can also explain the end of stanza 10: “Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow/ Things should start to get interesting right about now.” Because the performance says the opposite of the words: Nothing will ever be of interest from here on.

So all in all, “true love” between people seems to be at road’s end. The final stanza goes: “Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as clay”, but there is still some semblance of comfort, because it continues as follows: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”. This is similar to some verses in the middle of another song from the same album, namely “Summer Days”: “She says, ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ I say, ‘You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.’” These passages say that, realistically, the passage of time is inexorably linear, the past is finished and bygone. But they also say that time is not only linear, the past is both repeatable and exists in the present – the same perception of time that characterises Blood on the Tracks.

This is supported by stanza 11 in “Mississippi”: “I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind/ So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine”. This cannot be interpreted as being directed at the song’s story level; rather the artist is also here directing his love towards the audience – and above all towards his own songs and the performance of them (the Music).



Dylan’s love songs are diverse and very often have multiple meanings. A powerful element of disillusion characterises this part of his work – despite there being individual happy songs. The first stage of the disillusion is the anti-love songs from the mid-1960s, the other stage is the change between Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks, where love between people must give way to a higher and more lasting music comprehension of love. Wilfrid Mellers is right in saying that love between people is no longer seen as sufficient.

Blood on the Tracks, however, is a transitional record in the sense that everlasting love between people is still recognised in a petrarchan form, which above all, Wolfram Ette has pointed us in the direction of. This form of transcendent love never quite disappears from Dylan’s work. Small glimpses and remnants of it remain, also in an existentially bankrupt song such as “Mississippi”. However, the petrarchan love is also giving way to a steadily stronger emphasis of the singer’s feelings towards his listeners and the love for his own and others’ songs. This is the music love that is most recurring and which has characterised Bob Dylan’s work for the longest time.


Erling Aadland
Professor of comparative literature
University of Bergen, Norway

[1] Larry “Ratso” Sloman: On the Road with Bob Dylan, [1978] 2002: “‘Hey, I also rewrote “If You See Her Say Hello”’, he shouted as I turned to head back to the control room. ‘It goes, “If you see her say hello/ she might be in Babylon/ She left here last early spring/ it took me a long time to learn that she was gone”’ (s. 38-39); and: “[...] as Dylan spat out the new words, “If she passes through this way most likely I’d be gone, But if I’m not don’t tell her so, just let her pass on”, turning the mournful lost-love ballad into a revenge song” (s. 58).

Derek Barker writes: “In the spring of 1976 in Tallahassee and Lakeland, Florida, Bob began the song with the verse: “If you see her say hello, she might be in North Saigon/ She left here in a hurry; I don’t know what she was on/ You might say that I’m in disarray and for me time’s standing still,/ Oh I’ve never gotten over her, I don’t think I ever will” (s. 186-87). Barker continues: “Disarray, however, turns to anger and possible jealousy, as the singer informs anyone that might be making love to her to watch their backs. “If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear/ You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear/ For it’s natural to dream of peace as it is for rules to break/ And right now I’ve not got much to lose, so you’d better stay awake” (s. 187). “However, by the spring of 1976 Dylan is asking the Lord for strength to say no. “Well I know she’ll be back someday, of that there is no doubt/ And when that moment comes, Lord, give me strength to keep her out.” Same place its always called: “She’s better off with someone else and I’m better off alone”.

[2] This is literary borrowing from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1929). Cf. Oliver Trager, 2004, p. 594

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