“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics. An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.
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By Tony Attwood
“You’re a big girl now” is an interesting song to investigate in terms of the lyrics and the music because Bob Dylan changed the accompaniment (in terms of the chord sequences) once he had written the original. This is the original version…
I am grateful – and most certainly not for the first time – to Eyolf Østrem for tabulating this. I certainly don’t want to impinge on his copyright for all the work done in that regard… if you want the whole transcription it is here
But perhaps I may just give this opening which Eyolf Østrem has transcribed from that original as an indication of what was going on…
Emaj7 B11
Our conversation was short and sweet
Emaj7 B11
It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
E(iv) B(ii) A
Now even if you don’t know anything much about music and chords, you might well recognise that those chords above are the norm – but at least they are repeated, and you will be able to find them in any decent book of guitar chords.
So moving on this is what Bob did with the song when it was released on the album, again with the Eyolf Østrem transcription below.
Bm Am Our conversation was short and sweet Bm Am It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
Of course you can see at once that Bob has simplified the chords. But also when you hear it, the song is still hopelessly sad, but is much more determined – the singer is much more assertive as to what he has done.
What this change (which I suspect many listeners will not have fully taken in – after all the focus is generally on Bob the singer, rather than what the music is doing) has done is made the opening less sad but more assertive. And the question arises, why did he do that?
We do know that perhaps more than any other contemporary songwriter Bob changes his songs repeatedly – the Never Ending Tour shows us that time and again. And it can be argued that he does this just to keep up the interest.
But I feel something more than that. In the first version above those chords give us a much more tentative feel to the piece. It is as if the edge within that short and sweet conversation is still there, making him feel very uncertain, not sure where to go next what to do next.
However the much simplified second version with its B minor to A minor chord sequence, retains all the sadness (minor chords tend to sound sad to Western audiences, especially when in an unusual combination as with B minor to A minor at the start of a song), but it removes the uncertainty.
And if there is an emotion that is conveyed by E major 11 to B11, it is uncertainty, for the simple reason that there are so many notes in those chords, that even when they are not played in full, there is still that feeling that we don’t know where we are. (E major 11 for example contains the notes E, G#, B, D, F#, A). Now not every one of those notes has to be played – although you most certainly must include the E, D and A otherwise the chord loses is shape and feel – but it is a complex chord which we tend to hear as representing a complex situation or state of mind.
B minor is a much simpler chord made up of B, D and F#. With that we know where we are. It symbolises sadness.
So what Bob has done in moving from the original version (from Biograph) to the simplified version (from Blood on the Tracks) is emphasised the sadness and I think the resignedness, over the confusion and uncertainty created by that original version.
It’s a subtle change and I know that most listeners without having studied a musical instrument will not really appreciate what is going on, but Bob made that change (quite possibly without thinking about or even knowing why) to get that extra emphasis in the song. He wanted to move it from uncertainty to resignedness and sadness.
This of course fits with the title of the album – “Blood on the Tracks” leaves us in no doubt as to what sort of world we are in. There is no sense of “I don’t know what’s going on” in that title, while the original recording of “Big Girl Now” is one of sadness combined with a lack of being quite sure why this has all gone wrong. In fact, exactly the opposite of “Blood on the Tracks”
As I just said, it is subtle and many listeners without the benefit of a knowledge of how chords work won’t be sure what has happened, but they will, I think appreciate what the feeling now is in the final version.
In short, it is a brilliant move by Bob the musician, and one that is missed in commentaries that focus totally on the lyrics.
Previously in this series….
- A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall.
- Abandoned Love
- Alberta
- All along the watchtower
- Angelina
- Ballad for a Friend
- Beyond here lies nothing
- Blind Willie McTell
- Black Diamond Bay
- Can you please crawl out your window
- Caribbean Wind – Dylan’s musical exploration of evolving uncertainty
- Chimes of Freedom
- Cold Irons Bound
- Cover Down Pray Through
- Dark Eyes
- Desolation Row
- Drifter’s Escape
- Don’t think twice it’s all right.
- Early Roman Kings
- Every grain of sand
- Everything is broken
- False Prophet
- Foot of pride
- Gates of Eden
- Girl from the north country / Boots of Spanish leather
- Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and the 13 bar blues
- High Water, a rise, a fall, a bounce, a flood
- Highway 61 Revisited
- I believe in you
- “I Want You”. It was never meant to be like this.
- Idiot wind
- If not for you
- It takes a lot to laugh
- It’s all over now baby blue
- It’s all right ma: life really is ok despite everything.
- Isis
- It ain’t me babe
- Jokerman
- Just like a woman
- Key West
- Lenny Bruce is Dead
- Love Sick
- Man in the Long Black Coat
- Masters of War
- Mississippi
- Not Dark Yet
- One too many mornings
- She Belongs to Me
- Shelter from the Storm
- Simple Twist of Fate
- Sign on the window
- Tangled up in blue
- Tombstone Blues
- The Wicked Messenger
- Workingmen’s Blues # 2
- Yonder Comes Sin
Almost all of the songs on Blood on the Tracks were originally recorded in an open E tuning: https://dylanchords.com/16_bott
The rewrite between the New York sessions (played in open E) & Minneapolis (played in standard) surely owes a lot to the way the chords are fingered. I’ve never tried playing the songs in open E, but can only assume based on Eyolf’s incredible transcription work that the fancier-seeming chords are much easier to play. It obviously (as you point out eloquently) gives the song a different flavor. I do wonder if moving things out of open E was perhaps a response to the early criticism that the album was too stark/depressing.
Jesse that is a very interesting point, and one I’d not thought of. There would also be the point that with the majority of the songs recorded with open E tuning there would be a feel of sameness running through the album which would not be deserved, but would I fear creep in as one played the album over and over (as I think many of us did when first getting the album – certainly I did). Really grateful to you for bringing that up.