An Introduction to the Lyrics of Bob Dylan

Some Notes on Style

Lyrics are an important part of Dylan's music. His poetic ability, unpolished and unconventional vocal style and the candidness of his verses contribute to making the lyrics of his songs feel natural and sincere without sounding sentimental. Repetition is important to music in general, but is especially conspicuous in Dylan's songwriting. The recurrence of a word or a phrase at the end of every stanza where the repeated words or phrase is indicated in the song's title is a technique Dylan used consistently throughout his career. This template of song writing may be related to the wandering and independent nature of Dylan's verses and allows Dylan to write in a way that is at once disjointed and unified. Dylan's poetry centers on a singular theme or image which is repeated and refracted through varied stanzas that deal with the central idea in their own way.

Political Dylan

1962 – 1964, Dylan's “early period” of song writing is characterized by songs with a clear message or moral and a self-assured, almost pious, manner of delivery. “To Ramona” – five verses total:

I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one
And no one is better than you
If you really believe that
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you must be exactly like them

Dylan's lyrics at this time were overtly poetic, full of panache and bordering on the pretentious. “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” is brimming with poetic and revelatory visions of nature and music (five verses total):

The last of leaves fell from the trees
And clung to a new love’s breast
The branches bare like a banjo played
To the winds that listened best
I gazed down in the river’s mirror
And watched its winding strum
The water smooth ran like a hymn
And like a harp did hum

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are A Changin' (1964) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) contain songs that spoke to the political tumult of the 60s including the civil rights struggle, McCarthysim, anti-war movements and specific instances of social injustice. Dylan's songs from time time capture the sense of a young generation rebelling against the policies and ideas of the political establishment and a political landscape in flux. Songs in this vein include: “When the Ship Comes In,” “Paths of Victory,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” “Walls of Red Wing,” “Forever Young,” “The Death of Emmett Till” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” to name a few.

“Blowin' in the Wind” is a moralistic song with rhetorical questions of condescension directed at the political establishment (three verses total):

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

“Chimes of Freedom” combines naturalistic imagery with the theme of redemption from servitude which recurs in many songs throughout Dylan's career (six verses total):

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
And for each an’ every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

“The Times They are a Changin',” one of Dylan's most iconic and recognizable compositions, romanticizes youth and its role in political upheaval.

Identification with the Vagrant

Dylan often identifies with the poor, the vagrant and the homeless in his songs. “Hard Times in New York Town,” “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” “Freight Train Blues,” “One Too Many Mornings” and “Moonshiner,” describe with empathy the characters who are marginalized by society. “I Was Young When I Left Home” is similar in style and has the haunting quality of evoking Dylan's own early exodus to from Minnesota to New York (eight verses total):

I was young when I left home
An' I been out a-ramblin' round
An' I never wrote a letter to my home
To my home, lord, to my home
An' I never wrote a letter to my home.

Throughout these songs, Dylan grapples with the idea:

Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down,
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground,
To wait for your future like a horse that's gone lame,
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?

“Only a Hobo,” Times They are a Changin'

“Song to Woody,” one of two original songs on the album Bob Dylan (1962), is uncharacteristically personal for a Dylan song. The song contains the sage voice of Dylan's early style, appreciation for the legends that inspired him, and a sober image of the traveling musician who lives on the road (five verses total):

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I'm seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

I'm leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I've been hitting some hard traveling too.

Existential Dylan

Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Bringing it All Back Home (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), some of Dylan's most critically acclaimed albums, contain songs driven by introspective and psychological themes and surrealistic imagery. In these songs, the intimacy of Dylan's musical style and the power of his poetry allows him to articulate a disquieted frame of mind and convey a profound sense of loneliness, longing and sincerity. There is no narrative in “Visions of Johanna” and no message or moral - only atmosphere. In this song, Dylan describes his relationship with a girl named Louise and contrasts this relationship with a haunting vision of the unattainable, unreal and perhaps spiritual Johanna. This notion of a character being haunted by a memory is pervasive throughout Dylan's work (five verses total):

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing really nothing to turn of
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

Wikipedia's article on the song offers responses from various Dylan critics.

“Desolation Row,” describes a Kafkaesque parade of surrealistic imagery with varied references to literature and mythology and pop-culture. The specific characters referenced by name in this song: Cinderella, Betty Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, Ophelia, Einstein, Robin Hood, Casanova, the Phantom of the Opera, Nero, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliott and Calypso (ten verses total).

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliott
Fighting in the captains tower
While Calypso's singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About desolation row

“Highway 61 Revisited,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “From A Buick 6,” “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” are written in this style.

The long and rambling lyrics of “I'm Not There” (1967) are so obtuse as to border on nonsense-verse, yet this abstract delivery seems to capture the inner voice of a mind wandering in a numb haze of drugs, stress, isolation or loneliness. Dylan's mournful sound suggests we are getting an unguarded insight into the inner workings of a tumultuous subconscious (eight verses total):

Yes I believe that it's rightful 
Oh I believe it in my mind 
I been told like I said one night before 
Carry on the grind. 
And this song gypsy told her like I said carry on 
I wish I was there to help her 
But I'm not there I'm gone.

Also new to this period is Dylan's capacity for fierce spite and anger. “Ballad of a Thin Man,” is a vicious attack on a blundering and confused “outsider” who is trying to learn about Dylan's world, and “Like a Rolling Stone” is blistering and vengeful harangue against some unnamed enemy.

Nothing epitomizes Dylan's ability to channel the frantic urgency of the 60s beat generation like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (four verses total):

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the DA
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try, 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.

Storyteller Dylan

Through his music, Dylan has told expansive and wild stories. Like many of Dylan's lyrics, the details and specific intention of these stories are never fully evident but unfold artfully while ever teetering on the brink of incoherence. The narrative content of these stories is less important than the fast moving scenery and the unpredictable jumping between narrative voices and perspectives. This style is well captured by a statement from the little neighbor boy in “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” John Wesley Harding (1967):

No one tried to say a thing
When they took him out in jest
Except, of course, the little neighbor boy
Who carried him to rest
And he just walked along, alone
With his guilt so well concealed
And muttered underneath his breath
“Nothing is revealed”

Different from the standard short story or novel, Dylan's storytelling encourages the listener to embrace ambiguity and to explore the boundaries between lucidity and nonsense. In these songs, Dylan is able to convey the sense of a great tale without actually making sense - a compelling and exciting narrative that isn't actually understood. Among them, “Lily, Rosemary And the Jack of Hearts,” Blood on the Tracks (1975), is a long and busy song with fifteen verses and no chorus overflowing with character development and exciting plot action. Wikipedia's article on the song outlines main characters, plot, themes and possible interpretations. The recurrence of the words “Jack of Hearts” at the end of each verse embody the song's structure and source of repetition, and the intention of these words seamlessly alternates between referring to a person with the nickname “The Jack of Hearts” and the playing card (fifteen verses total):

Backstage the girls were playing five card stud by the stairs
Lily had two queens she was hoping for a third to match her pair
Outside the streets were filling up, the window was open wide
A gentle breeze was blowing, you could feel it from inside
Lily called another bet and drew up the Jack of Hearts.

“Tangled Up in Blue”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Black Diamond Bay” and “Isis” are in this style.

Dylan and the Outlaw

Many of the more linear and comprehensible stories that Dylan has told romanticize an outlaw on the run who ends up getting killed. “Romance in Durango,” Desire (1976) tells the story of an outlaw and his lover on the run to Mexico (nine verses total):

Quick, Magdalena, take my gun
Look up in the hills that flash of light
Aim well my little one
We may not make it through the night.

“Billy 4” (nine verses total):

The businessmen from Taos want you to go down 
So they've hired mister Garrett, he'll force you to slow down 
Billy, don't let it make you feel so low down 
To be hunted by the man who was your friend.

“Joey,” Desire (twelve verses total):

It was true that in his later years he would not carry a gun
"I'm around too many children", he'd say, "they should never know of one"
Yet he walked right into the clubhouse of his lifelong deadly foe
Emptied out his register, said, "Tell 'em it was Crazy Joe".

"John Wesley Harding" is a relatively short song that combines the theme of the hero outlaw with an esoteric and incomplete narrative style (full song):

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor
He traveled with a gun in every hand
All along this countryside
He opened many a door
But he was never known
To hurt an honest man
’Twas down in Chaynee County
A time they talk about
With his lady by his side
He took a stand
And soon the situation there
Was all but straightened out
For he was always known
To lend a helping hand
All across the telegraph
His name it did resound
But no charge held against him
Could they prove
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down
He was never known
To make a foolish move

Similarly, the hero of “Rambling Gambling Willie,” is a charitable gambler who gets killed at the poker table.

"Love Songs"

A substantial portion of Dylan's work reflects on his experiences in love and relationships. Some songs capture the experience of a broken or failed relationship (“Don't Think Twice It's Alright,” “One of Us Must Know,” “And I'll Go Mine”), others are loving and devotional (“Make You Feel my Love,” “I Want You,” “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Nobody 'Cept You”).

"Nobody 'Cept You" (four verses total):

There’s a hymn I used to hear
In the churches all the time
Make me feel so good inside
So peaceful, so sublime
And there’s nothing to remind me of that
Old familiar chime
’Cept you,

Used to play in the cemetery
Dance and sing and run when I was a child
Never seemed strange
But now I just pass mournfully by
That place where the bones of life are piled
I know something has changed
I’m a stranger here and no one sees me
’Cept you

Other “love songs,” capture a despairing sense of longing for a past love (“If You See Her Say Hello,” “Girl From the North Country Fair”). Various songs in Dylan's Time out of Mind (1997) album capture the painful loneliness of love lost:

“Love Sick” - five verses total:

I'm walkin' through streets that are dead
Walkin', walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin'.

I'm sick of love that I'm in the thick of it
This kind of love, I'm so sick of it.

“Can't Wait” – five verses total:

It's mighty funny
The end of time has just begun
Oh, honey, after all these years you're still the one
Well, I'm strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind
I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line
I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate
I don't know how much longer I can wait.

Possibly channeling the turmoil of Dylan's rocky marriage to Sara Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” Blood on the Tracks (1974), is one of the most the spiteful songs Dylan ever wrote (eight verses total):

I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin’ I was somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me
You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

The song “Sara” from the album Desire (1975) is a deeply personal and loving tribute to the same Sara Dylan. From Wikipedia's article on the album:

Desire closes with "Sara", arguably Dylan's most public display of his own personal life. An ambitious tribute to his wife, Sara, is possibly Dylan's only song in which he steps out of his public persona and directly addresses a real person, with striking biographical accuracy. Tim Riley wrote that it was "a fevered cry of loss posing as sincere devotion." Dylan's marriage was in a turbulent state when he wrote the song. Dylan's estrangement from his wife had led to at least one separation in the previous year. Sara was present at the song's recording session...In March 1977, Sara Dylan filed for divorce.

Spiritual Dylan

After Desire, Dylan entered his “born again” period of songwriting which channeled his experience of becoming a born again Christian. Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) are albums of gospel music and christian rock and are mostly void of secular themes. Subsequent albums abandon this genre but some of the religious imagery and language from this period recur in less didactic forms. In 1983 Dylan recorded “Blind Willie McTell” which is partially a tribute to the American blues legend, but also an abstract and rich amalgam of religious and American imagery. The verses sound like the unfiltered contents of a solitary artist haunted by images of his American cultural heritage and a sense of the divine. The character of Blind Willie McTell reflects the ineffability of music and the almost mystical power of a dead musician to communicate across generations. The juxtaposition of New Orleans with Jerusalem evokes the author's double allegiance to religious sensitives and his American artistic context (five verses total):

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem”
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

“Every Grain of Sand” is an introspective song that reflects on Dylan's sense of the divine and a gnawing anxiety caused by looking back on life and trying to make sense of it (Dylan is almost forty years old at this point). The opening line of the song: “In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need” is an indication that he is laying himself bare (six verses total):

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other time it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

“Ring Them Bells,” balances religious values and universalism without sounding didactic or self-righteous (five verses total):

Ring them bells Sweet Martha
For the poor man’s son
Ring them bells so the world will know
That God is one
Oh the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled
With lost sheep

Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf
Ring them bells for all of us who are left
Ring them bells for the chosen few
Who will judge the many when the game is through
Ring them bells, for the time that flies
For the child that cries
When innocence dies

Foreboding apocalyptic imagery is used to set the tone of “Man in the Long Black Coat,” Oh Mercy (1989) which describes a woman who falls in love and leaves without warning with a nameless man (five verses total):

Somebody seen him hanging around
At the old dance hall on the outskirts of town
He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance, he had a face like a mask
Somebody said from the Bible he’d quote
There was dust on the man
In the long black coat

There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way
But people don't live or die, people just float
She went with the man
In the long black coat

Also in this style and from this period, “Angelina” mixes existential and devotional poetry with Dylan's mythologized portrayal of an embattled South American country-side (ten verses total):

There’s a black Mercedes rollin’ through the combat zone
Your servants are half dead, you’re down to the bone
Tell me, tall men, where would you like to be overthrown
Maybe down in Jerusalem or Argentina?

Tempest

Dylan's thirty-fifth and most recent studio album, Tempest, was released in September 2012 and was received with wide critical acclaim. The album contains elements which are nostalgic to earlier periods in Dylan's career as well as compositions in which Dylan's lyrical talent and innovation are impressive as ever. One of the most striking elements in this album is the way death pervades the last three tracks. “Tin Angel” describes a deadly love triangle and contains the following graphic image:

First bullet grazed his ear
Second ball went right straight in
And he bent in the middle like a twisted pin
He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head
He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed
It would take more than needle and thread
Bleeding from the mouth, hes as good as dead

The song “Tempest” is a James Cameron inspired, forty-five verse and fourteen minute epic description of the sinking RMS Titanic. The song opens with the ship sailing tranquilly and at verse nine we start getting a description of the accident and destruction:

Smokestack was leaning sideways
Heavy feet began to pound
He walked into the whirlwind
Sky splitting all around

The ship was going under
The universe had opened wide
The roll was called up yonder
The angels turned aside

At verse eighteen, Dylan focuses on individual passengers on board and describes their varied reactions to trauma and impending death:

They lowered down the lifeboats
From the sinking wreck
There were traitors, there were turncoats
Broken backs and broken necks

The bishop left his cabin
To help others in need
Turned his eyes up to the heavens
Said, "The poor are yours to feed"

Jim Dandy smiled
He never learned to swim
Saw the little crippled child
And he gave his seat to him

He saw the starlight shining
Streaming from the East
Death was on the rampage
But his heart was now at peace

At verse forty-two, Dylan reflects on the scope of this tragedy:

When the Reaper's task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best

They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
On the judgment of God's hand

Verse forty-four describes the reaction of the people back home hearing about the event:

The news came over the wires
And struck with deadly force
Love had lost its fires
All things had run their course

The final verse of the song returns a motif which recurs throughout the song - the dreaming watchman:

The watchman he lay dreaming
Of all the things that can be
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea

The actual sinking of the ship is juxtaposed with the dream of a sleeping watchman. For me, this technique reflects on the transience of human life and how life might be just another type of dream from which we have yet to wake.

The last track on the album, “Roll On John,” is a stunning and respectful tribute to the legend John Lennon and is filled with references to Lennon's life, character and specific songs. The complete lyrics with analysis of specific references can be found here: http://rock.rapgenius.com/Bob-dylan-roll-on-john-lyrics (click the yellow text to read annotations).

From “My Back Pages,” Another Side of Bob Dylan – six verses total:

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now