Yellow Railroads

Derik Badman might be interested in this, from Luc Sante's NYRB review of Dylan's Chronicles:

In a revealing interview for a book called Songwriters on Songwriting, excerpted in Studio A[: The Bob Dylan Reader], Dylan talks about the "unconscious frame of mind," the state of suspension he uses to bypass literal thinking:

In the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.

In other words, his use of rhymes is not unlike a Surrealist game or an Oulipo exercise, a way to outsmart front-brain thinking, and the same is true of his employment of folk-lyric readymades. When Dylan hit mid-career, though, exhaustion and self-consciousness and the weight of his own reputation pushed him into self-impersonation, and he began to write songs that laboriously strove for effects. He knows the difference. In the same interview he is asked about a line from "Slow Train":

But that line...is an intellectual line. It's a line, "Well, the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency," that could be a lie. It just could be. Whereas "Standing under your yellow railroad" [from "Absolutely Sweet Marie"], that's not a lie.

I'll also quote this, largely because I agree with it:

Blood on the Tracks (1974) is cited by many as their favorite Dylan record. . .It is, to be sure, quite an achievement, with a wealth of lived experience in its dense, intricately plotted songs. And yet, in comparison to the songs on Blonde on Blonde or The Basement Tapes, which are genuine, sphinx-like, irreducible, hard-shell poems whether or not the words can ever be usefully divorced from the music, such numbers as "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Idiot Wind" are prose. They are driven by their narratives, and their imagery is determined by its function. . .

Nothing on Blood on the Tracks hobbles in on crutches or speaks to the future or appears on the wall in letters of fire. It is a brilliant account of the vicissitudes of a love affair, an exemplary specimen of the confessional culture of the period, a remarkable work of emotional intelligence. It is so many people's favorite Dylan album in large part because it is the one that people can imagine themselves creating, were the muse to tap them on the forehead with a nine-pound hammer. . . .

Comments

[Matt]

One could take the "S + 7" OULIPO rule of replacing every noun with the seventh noun in the dictionary of one's choice and apply it to a Dylan song and get something like this:

- original
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

- oulipo rules
How does it feel
To be without a homophobia
Like a complete unpredictable
Like a rolling stoplight?

It doesn't always work but it's fun.

[Matt]

No...not so much. Thanks very much for sharing this, Dan.