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By Tony Attwood
When, many many years ago, I first started researching pop and rock music as an academic subject, one of the issues I got interested in was Dylan’s ability to move beyond the basic themes of conventional pop music (dance, love and lost love) and to introduce themes which even if they were not new, were unusual in contemporary music. Bob in fact took the lyrics of songs into all sorts of subject areas that very few had ventured into before.
And he also explored a few variations on the central themes, as with his songs of leaving, a subject on which I have touched before. Among such songs that I considered in this category we had
But of course there have been many others, and to that list we might add “I was young when I left home”
It has that really deep blues feeling of the world gone wrong, which is such a regular theme of the blues. And I would add that I do find some of the songs in this genre to be awfully depressing. After all, for most of us life can be changed and past mistakes undone, so why linger on desperate tales of the past? I certainly did change the place where I lived multiple times between the age of 18 and maybe 30 or so, but after that started to calm down.
I’ve lived in my current home for around 25 years – far, far longer than I’ve been in any other house, and thinking of Bob I wonder if he too has settled down. Although looking at the Never Ending Tour dates it seems hard to believe he has. He just keeps on keeping on.
So as I look at the Farewell songs it really does strike me just how many of these “moving on” pieces Bob has written. Although to be fair Bob was at this time fitting his enormous ability as a songwriter into a standard, established style of folk song writing.
Farewell Angelina of course fits into the cycle of farewell songs. There are multiple recordings of the song but I am not sure anything beats the Baez recording
And then we have Restless Farewell, a song which I often find is sometimes ignored or forgotten, perhaps because it doesn’t haven’t a regular beat. But really it should be played from time to time if for no other reason than to remind us just how varied Dylan’s songwriting has been, and how accomplished is his ability in these sad songs of farewell.
What fascinates me is that, in pop and rock music in general, the central theme in departure songs is that the singer (normally a man) has been left by a woman. And yet Bob often turns this around so that he is the one leaving and moving on. It is as if, in the songs, the moving on, the restlessness, is a central part of the man’s life.
Which of course leads us on to Going going gone…
I would imagine (and of course it is just my imagination here) that Bob has within himself a regular need to keep moving on, and to keep changing, which has been expressed in the music that he creates, his constant touring, and the regular way in which he has changed his style and approach to music – and as well made him wish to keep on touring, far beyond the age where most musicians have long since stopped.
It is, I suspect, something very deep inside him. So deep he doesn’t even notice – except it comes out in the songs.