Songs of Love 10
Apologies for the two-week delay on this one; I've been away for two successive weekends, and have forgotten to schedule the post on both occasions. In a way, it's fitting, though, given that the A-Side here in particular has to do with delay and deferment.
This time around, two long songs, and not incidentally so. The question of duration is always an interesting one when it comes to music – a song has no established length, as a particular performance of it may be extended or contracted by as little as a single bar or as much as several verses, especially in the realm of jazz (which its focus on improvisation) or folk (where the text of a song can vary considerably between performers). With a recording, though, we have a very finite length – we’re in that world for three minutes thirty, or four minutes fifty-five, or however long it takes. Into that time, with a love song, may be stretched the entire length of a relationship. That’s not quite what’s going on in either of these examples, though, which use their considerable length to very different and specific purposes, both of which are about sharing some kind of emotional truth. One also just happens to be about teasing the listener…
A-Side
Performed by Dexys Midnight Runners
Written by Billy Adams, Helen O’Hara and Kevin Rowland
Released 1985
In Ireland, it’s quite common to ask “what are you like?” or even “what am I like?” rhetorically. It generally conveys exasperation and/or amusement – somebody is doing something strange, incompetent or otherwise contrary to expectation, and so you ask “what are you like?” as if seeking to get some kind of explanation[1]. None will ever be forthcoming, of course; it’s one of those questions you ask purely to draw attention to the asking. Because really, how can you ever accurately and fully convey what someone is “like”?
It's a common and relatable problem. You’re asked about someone close to you, to give a brief description of them, and find yourself stumped – not because you don’t know, but because it’s impossible to fully articulate the experience of being around them, the many nuances of their personality. It’s extremely difficult to even get close to managing this with a close friend or family member, someone you’ve known for years and spent a good deal of time with, though you might have a chance at getting across your impressions of someone you don’t know well. But when it comes to someone you’re in romantic love with, if anyone is fool enough to ask you what they’re “like,” they’re either not going to get any kind of answer, or they’ll get too much of one.
Plenty of love songs take the latter approach, telling us all about the lover, their quirks and salient features, even elements of their body in the style of the Song of Solomon, one of the formative love songs of the western canon. This one, though, takes the opposite. It refuses to commit to any real sense of what the lover is like, teasing and frustrating the listener for twelve whole minutes, and in so doing, it draws attention to the impossibility of ever fully explaining how another person makes you feel. The song doesn’t even properly start for a good minute and a half, bringing us first into a nothing conversation before that conversation takes flight into song, as if even the song itself is deferred.
The singer does try here, at least temporarily, to give us a sense of their lover with little vignettes and observations by way of analogy, but they don’t quite go anywhere, or give us anything concrete to go on. The closest we get is a negative (“she would never do that”), which is somewhat less than fully satisfying. Is the singer deliberately stringing us along, or just failing to find an adequate description? It’s hard to be sure, but either way, the effect is the same. There’s an inarticulacy at the heart of this song, barely disguised by the fact that it’s so wordy. Language proves utterly incapable when it comes to capturing a person, and the feelings associated with them.
Which is, of course, where music comes in. My training is in literary studies, which is why I tend to focus on lyrics a lot in these entries. But always, these are songs, not poems with musical accompaniment. They’re meant to be performed, and the lyrics are only part of a larger whole. Particularly in a case like this, where it’s the work of a band and the product of multiple authors, the role of the actual music shouldn’t be ignored. Because, implicitly, that’s where the answer to the “what’s she like” question comes. The singer can’t tell us, at least not in words, but maybe the musicians can, which is why he repeatedly admonishes us to “listen.” Music kicks in where language fails. It’s the opposite of what happened with ‘Black’ last entry, where the music took over the emotion. Here, the lyric is always giving way to the music.
And so the bouncy energy of the song lifts it from being a shaggy dog story into an actual affirmation of the power of love. The answer to the question doesn’t come in language, appealing to the rational part of the mind, but in music, appealing to emotion and to movement. We can’t explain what someone is like, how they make us feel, but maybe we can convey something of that experientially – what it feels like to be around them. Probably that’s the closest we can get.
[1] There’s a very good Pugwash song, a love song no less, called ‘What Are You Like’ which uses the phrase in more or less this context.
B-Side
Performed by Bob Dylan
Written by Bob Dylan
Released 1975
Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has returned again and again to the love song. And while he’s approached it in as many different ways as any other artist, and more than many, there’s one kind of love song in particular that he excels at, perhaps more than any other single artist: a song of messy, bitter, pained love, of what’s left behind after a great love affair has ended or faded. It’s there from the beginning of his career in songs like ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ or ‘One Too Many Mornings,’ through the extraordinary mid-career highlight ‘Most of the Time,’ and it shows up frequently in his late career in something like ‘Standing in the Doorway.’
This song, of course, comes from a whole album of such songs, Blood on the Tracks, often thought of as a break-up or divorce album (though as with many such characterisations, it’s not really that simple – watch this space). And this song might just be the crowning glory of that album, maybe the single finest example of the aforementioned sub-genre that Dylan has written in over 60 years. Like any great work, it can be approached in many, many different ways. But I want to think here about one of its most basic elements: its length. This is quite a long song; almost eight minutes, in fact, just a little shorter than, say, ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Far from the longest song of Dylan’s career (and not even the longest on its album[1]), but certainly fairly hefty. So, a basic question: why is it so long? The answer is simple: because it has to take in not only a whole relationship, but a significant chunk of time after the end of that relationship too. This song chronicles a whole chain of emotional development, the singer’s changing attitude over time.
We’ve touched on the concept of duration before; how songs, which inherently take up a certain amount of time, can represent the passage of time within them; with ‘Last Goodbye,’ for instance, which seemed to contain a break-up conversation within it (or perhaps was itself that conversation). Here, we’ve got something similar happening, but on a purely emotional plane. The song represents an evolution, or a mutation, of emotions. The reason it’s so long is that it has a lot to give voice to.
In his lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song (which no doubt will be showing up here again), Nick Cave talks about how his song ‘Far From Me’ was written over the course of an actual relationship; how its first verse is consequently “full of all the heroic drama of new love,” where the latter verses chart the decline and end of the relationship. Here, something not entirely dissimilar is going on. After the first verse tells us all about the reputational damage the singer has suffered, keenly aware of the damage to their ego and vaguely paranoid in a very Dylan way (“Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press”), the second verse gives us a relationship falling apart, where this wider misunderstanding has been picked up by the singer’s lover, who is consequently coming to feel a stranger:
Even you, yesterday, you had to ask me where it was at
I couldn’t believe after all these years you didn’t know me any better than that
Sweet lady
There’s a sense here, then, that something external has leaked into the relationship and corrupted it. By the third and fourth verses, though, this feeling of estrangement has been replaced by bitterness, even rage. These verses are replete with images of pain, destruction and death: “a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door,” “lightning that might strike,” “one day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes/Blood on your saddle.” The break-up has become competitive, a zero-sum game; the lone soldier (a stand-in for the singer in their passive suffering) has “won the war/After losing every battle.” It’s all violence and competition, the kind of acrimonious divorce or break-up where battle lines are drawn. That sense of being embattled and bitter from the first verse has moved inwards to the relationship itself.
And, of course, there’s the chorus, where the lover’s words are the “idiot wind” of the title, signifying nothing. It’s so bitter and bilious that it’s genuinely startling, even a bit concerning; this is the sort of thing that gets Dylan accused of misogyny by some critics. But it’s also truthful in its catharsis; it’s a vessel for an anger that’s understandable if not justified. What’s more, the context of the “idiot wind” changes; in the second chorus, it picks up the images of death from the verses (“blowing through the flowers on your tomb”), but in the first and third it’s wider and more expansive, placed in a geographic context. The third in particular gives us the extraordinary couplet, beloved of Allen Ginsberg, “blowing like a circle around my skull/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.”[2] Here the singer’s own feelings are expanded, blown up to the scale of the country. Their pain encompasses half a continent. What’s more, there’s more than a touch of obsession here, with his former lover’s words circling the singer’s head constantly, as if looking for an outlet.
Similarly, the fifth and sixth verses move beyond rage. The break-up is no longer something that incurs blame, but something that was bound to happen, blamed on “gravity” and “destiny” (a theme of fatalism which will be echoed, from a different perspective, in the next song on the album, ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’). Here the prevailing tone, rather than violence, is one of sorrow – a priest wearing black, the spring turning to autumn (itself a natural and inevitable process). The bitterness hasn’t entirely faded; we still hear about the ex’s “corrupt ways,” but even this is a cause for sorrow, as they’ve “finally made you blind.” The lovers have become unrecognisable to each other as time has passed. And for the first time, we get a hint that the singer might share a little blame in what happened: “You tamed the lion in my cage, but it just wasn’t enough to change my heart.” By inference, the singer’s heart, their very essence, caused the end of the relationship. As we’ve already been told, it was doomed from the start.
By the seventh and eighth verses, time has definitively moved on. The singer is now caught between being distant from the former lover (“I can’t feel you anymore”) and being “hounded by your memory.” Both these things are summarised neatly in the wonderful line “I can’t even touch the books you’ve read” – because the memories are so distant as to be unrecognisable, or because the association is too painful? There’s still hints of rage – the singer proudly admits to moving past being “double-crossed.” But the fact that they’ve gone beyond that is made very clear in the final lines of the verse:
You’ll never know the hurt I’ve 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
For me, these are the lines that raise this song from being a clever and heartfelt paean to lost love to being an utter masterpiece and one of the highlights of Dylan’s entire oeuvre. Here, all at once, there’s an outbreak of self-awareness and recrimination. The singer acknowledges their own sense of loss, but also that the former lover could say exactly the same. She could write her own song about all of this, full of startling imagery of death and blood and sad priests, and the singer will never get to hear it. Because now they are, finally, strangers to each other. And there’s a freedom to that (“I’ve kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me”), but also a profound sorrow. The break is now decisive.
And lest we be left in any doubt, the final chorus changes its pronouns. Now the “idiot wind” is blowing through “the buttons of our coats” and “the letters that we wrote.” It’s permeating them, despite their defences, and infusing everything they try to express. And the singer signs off with a wry smile: “We’re idiots, babe/It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.” If there is blame here, it’s to be shared. It takes two to mess up a relationship, just as it takes two to form one.
And so the movement of the song is complete. It’s not unlike a messier version of the five stages of grief: from bafflement to anger to sorrow to a kind of acceptance (this singer seems rather too stubborn, in typical Dylan fashion, to engage in any kind of bargaining). But part of what makes the song feel so real and striking is that these are not discrete stages; they blur together. The rage is still visible somewhere in the background of the sorrow; the bafflement never truly fades away. Nothing here is neat, it’s all messy frayed edges. Which is just how it should be when something has been broken or torn.
[1] That honour goes to the gnomic and playful ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,’ one of the songs that most complicates Blood on the Tracks’s reputation, even if it is still broadly concerned with the vicissitudes of love.
[2] An unused version has “Blowing every time you move your jaw/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras.” I like the ironic sense of carnival in this, but it doesn’t have the same symbolic significance as “the Capitol,” and lacks the extraordinary skull image (which also, of course, calls back to the death imagery from before).
