09/02/2009 by Tony Attwood.

The moment one hears Tell Ol’ Bill it seems to relate directly to Things Have Changed.  Yes, there’s a different speed to the piece, but the whole feel of the music is similar.  

There’s that misty, removed feeling in the lyrics, and very similar orchestration.   The number of chords used is limited (although Tell Ol’ Bill is in a minor key while Things have Changed is in the more conventional major), but more than anything it is the feeling generated.  The feeling  through the arrangement on the Tell Tale Signs album, the feeling through the lyrics…  there is a world out there that is not quite making sense.

So wonderful is this piece at creating an image that this track alone would make Tell Tale Signs worth buying (although of course you also get Mississippi, which is also worth the cost of the whole album on its own).

Songs in minor keys usually have a sad, negative feel, yet this song bounces along.   The singer hardly has a penny to his name, but at the same time the river is whispering.  This is Dylan’s genius - to make a song of strangeness in a minor key bounce along, taking us all the way through to the line, “Anything is worth a try”

In the chordal accompaniment to the recording (which is uniquely for Dylan in B flat minor) there is that endlessly rocking G-flat major / F major interchange to introduce each line, which emphasises the opening, and which makes the whole thing rock along.   Yes, maybe the singer is near death (“the heavens have never seemed so near”) but this is nothing like “Not Dark Yet” – this is a man ok with his coming end.  He is running towards it, because anything is worth a try.

Thus throughout the song we have the contrasts – the rocking rhythm, the dry but well attuned voice, and these images of nameless places. 

And it is only as we progress that we see there is a woman involved

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I’ve nothing more to tell you now.

And it is that realisation that takes us forward:

I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate.

It is in fact a world gone wrong – a world that Dylan might have witnessed from the car in the video of “Times have changed” – a world where nothing is right, and everything is warped and twisted…
 
 
Tell Ol’ Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I’m not alone
That the hour has come to do or die.

A masterpiece.

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29/10/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Suddenly on Tell Tale Signs Mississippi becomes a new song, having been a political commentary when it first appeared in Time Out of Mind.

The two guitar production is utterly perfect for this interpretation which is wholly about the woman the singer has left, and for once in a Dylan orchestration it actually sounds like the performers know the piece and are listening to each other - the only roughness being the extra bars between verse 1 and 2.

What makes this a love song is the sympathy with which the words are sung to this, the original melody. “So many things we never will undo” is sympathetic, while “Last night I knew you tonight I don’t” has a melody and chord sequence that simply vanishes in other versions.

This is quite possibly one of Dylan’s greatest love songs. “Got no future got no past” is now just a throw away line, because the song is no longer about the singer, but about the woman he left behind. “Stick with me baby” becomes much more meaningful in terms of the relationship. When Dylan sings, “Don’t even have anything for myself any more,” he is not making a statement about his economic or political or surrealistic or modernist self, he is simply talking about a life lost. About the simple need to get away.

It is the lack of a full accompaniment that makes this work - it is the man singing to the woman or perhaps women that he has lost. “Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme” becomes a powerful line, not a throwaway.

If you still need convincing just listen to the delivery of “I have heard it all” with its extra quaver on “heard”.

“Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t” can be an aggressive line as in its original delivery, but now it is sad, because the singer knows he is the one who has mucked all this up. He is now gentle, sorry, thankful for the good times, sad about what went wrong.

It’s all over (no future no past) but he’s still here. “Stick with me baby anyhow” suddenly makes sense. “I know that fortune is waiting to be kind, so give me your hand and say you’ll be mine” despite everything. A simple life is offered at the end.

Yes, the best ever Dylan love song.

(Commentary revised 22 December 08)

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