Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight: the meaning within Dylan’s song

Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight

By Jerry Hallier

‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’, the final track on the 1983 album Infidels, is a  song that has not attracted much comment from critics and fans since its release.  

There are several possible reasons why ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ hasn’t generated much critical interest: conceivably, many fans see it as just another run-of-the-mill break-up song from an album that is famous for its varied song quality. Then too, the performance of the song may put some people off.  The 1980s’ computerized drum sound appears, to these ears at least, very ill-fitting with the more ‘Dylanish’ slide guitar and organ–led arrangement, and Dylan’s singing at times sounds over-wrought. Maybe I’m wrong but these aspects possibly make it easy for many listeners to take the song for granted as unexceptional and not worthy of any special attention.

Seen this way, I suggest that there is a risk of not hearing what the song is actually saying. A close reading I believe reveals that ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ is among those Dylan tunes where the listener can be wrong-footed by the song’s unreliable narrator.

To begin with, the song’s title and chorus give the impression that the narrator is trying to console his lover who is having some sort of distress about her decision to walk out of their relationship.

But while the chorus indicates that the narrator still wants / needs the relationship to continue, the verses show that, in truth, he is less concerned with his lover’s feelings and more absorbed with satisfying his own needs; indeed, in looking at how he attempts to persuade her to stay it appears more likely that it is the narrator, himself, who is likely to fall apart from the collapse of the relationship.  Taking each verse in turn, it can be seen that the man uses every insincere trick in the book to try to convince the woman to stay.

In the first verse, for example, he tries to convince her that without him she will be vulnerable to the dangers of the world.

You know the streets are filled with vipers

Who’ve lost all ray of hope

You know, it ain’t even safe no more

In the palace of the Pope

From there, he tries to make her feel sorry for him by saying he has squandered his potential to achieve something worthwhile and honourable:

I wish I’d have been a doctor

Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost

Maybe I’d have done some good in the world

‘Stead of burning every bridge I crossed

Ever the bleeding heart, he then explains that he is inadequate at telling her how much she means to him and wishes he could do so and get anything for her. Unfortunately, despite all these ambitions, he presents himself as an attractive victim who is held back, helpless:

But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting

That’s  hanging in the Louvre

My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches

But I know that I can’t move

And so it goes on. In the bridge and last verses, he attempts to stoke her paranoia further about the wisdom of trusting anyone else, even her friends, and he tops it off by summoning up her memories of the fun they have had in the past (which, certainly, she will lose if she leaves him).

I also like the way Dylan uses the choruses to allow the narrator to repeatedly invoke some pseudo philosophical twaddle about the significance of the past and the future,  again to further raise doubt in this woman’s mind to leave him.  

Thus, it is difficult not to see the narrator as someone who is fully self-absorbed and entirely willing to use every means he can think of to make the woman feel guilty about leaving him and to manipulate her into staying. Certainly, he never once cares enough to ask her what she feels or wants.

While ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ is far from being a great song, neither is it just filler.  Its worth lies in encouraging us to reflect on the self-serving and manipulative behaviours that we all can resort to when somebody we supposedly care about doesn’t want to do as we wish. Given also that man here is unquestioningly selfish, the song also reminds us to be wary of assuming that the narrators in his songs are Dylan himself.

Recent Posts

• A Christian song or a song about lost love? Bob Dylan’s “Somethings’ Burning Baby”
• Bob Dylan’s “When you gonna wake up”. A tale of doom and despair
• Precious Angel: an enigma inside a seemingly straightforward Bob Dylan song.
• Gonna change my Way of Thinking – twice. How Bob Dylan changed his own song

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”