![]() If you have never heard Dylan sing “Dirty Lie”, try it now.Handy Dandy: Bob Dylan playing at contradictions.Cat’s in the well: Dylan’s games with nursery rhymes.“What can I do for you?” Bob Dylan’s journey into pre-ordained certainty.Let Me Die in My Footsteps: was this Dylan’s first masterpiece?.Are You Ready?” The Christian side of Positively Fourth Street.Index of over Dylan 300 songs reviewed on the site.Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.There is a list of all the songs of the period in chronological order, with links to all the reviews so far, in the 1980s section of the Chronology Files. He was there and so secure with I once knew a man but then he felt the need to travel the by-ways of exploration throughout the rest of 1984 before he could get back on track. Yes he could have written this earlier in his career, but he needed all that experimenting and all that trying out of new ideas to get back here. It provides a perfect contrast and fits completely with the change of mood in the lyrics.Ībove all, what we feel, or at least what I feel, is that Dylan is now very much on secure territory. The song is in C major, and the surprise of the middle 8 (Didn’t I, Didn’t I try to love you?) is that suddenly we are jerked into B flat, F, C, the very familiar blues/rock sequence. And then its back to the rocking chords again. Two rotating chords and an easy to learn melody, before he suddenly surprises us with “Quicker than anyone I knew” which throws in the minor chord we were not expecting. Musically it is Dylan at his simple best. ![]() When the wind blows through the piney wood Yes he is justifying himself, and maybe in the end it is a little too much – or perhaps a lot too much – but then that is what Dylan does sometimes. ![]() It is self-justifying of course, but after the two verses that have gone before, we can take that. Then to surprise us Dylan takes us up a few notches with the middle 8. What makes the song work so well is that it is what every lover looking back with the deepest affection to a past affair – no matter how short or long – will want to sayĮven though you’ve only seen ’m one time or two I prefer the version with Tom Petty above – but each to his own. Here’s another version if you prefer – the contrast shows just how much there is in this song. Musically Dylan gets the approach just right, setting out the basics in those four simple lines before stressing just how deep this memory is It is a plaintive ballad as the opening lines show It was also featured, in an acoustic version, in the Masked & Anonymous movie, although for some reason not put on the soundtrack release. There’s a version recorded with Tom Petty which is really worth a listen if you can find it on the internet – the copy we were recommending seems to have gone. Next up Dylan composed “I’ll remember you”, and now we had a song that he really felt comfortable with, playing it from 22 September 1985 right through until 30 July 2005 – a 20 year spell in which he played it 226 times on stage. He might not have realised it himself, (and that is not me trying to be pompous, many artists find it hard to see the breakthrough they have just made) but all that experimentation had been worthwhile. In 1985 we then got Maybe Someday (Knocked out loaded) which I think is a brilliant song, but with a musical flaw in the vocal accompaniment, and Seeing the real you at last (Empire Burlesque). That Dylan wasn’t perhaps certain that he really had found his way through is seen by the fact that some of the songs from the era appeared on Knocked out loaded, and others on Empire Burlesque (and of course others not at all), but all the hard work of trying to find the new way forwards through 1984 had finally paid off. This was followed by Something’s Burning Baby in which I really do think Dylan had found the new way forward. ![]() Then we get New Danville Girl / Brownsville Girl which to me doesn’t work fully but is a much more successful experiment (although I recognise that some people see it as a masterpiece) than some of the pieces composed earlier in the year. It can be said that Bob Dylan spent 1984 trying to find his new muse experimenting all the way through the year up to Drifting too far from shore which, as I have said in the review of that song, really doesn’t work for me at all.
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