Thursday, October 13, 2016

"I wish, I wish, I wish in vain...."



Charlie Pierce wrote about Dylan today:

One of the enduring mysteries of having followed this man through his career, and through your own life, has been how songs that meant nothing to you when you were young suddenly strike deeply into you when placed in the context of the accumulated experiences of your life as you get older.
I never thought that about "Bob Dylan's Dream."  I always considered it the work of a young man imagining how an old man would feel.  Today, myself an old man, I heard Judy Collins sing it again, and this time it did make me "wonder...how he'd known what was coming."

The version above is not the one I was listening to, but Ms. Collins' voice was so much richer and warmer then that even the abbreviated version is a good one.  Besides, I didn't realize the melody was an old one.

This is Dylan's original; or at least an alternate version he recorded when he, too, was much younger.




3 comments:

  1. It's like the songs on The Band's "brown album" about old men who were sailors and people during the Civil War. It's a really impressive act of empathetic imagination, something that is a mark of real art.

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  2. Can't believe they snubbed "Art of the Deal" again.

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  3. Rick Allen wins the thread.

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