No Nobel Prize for Music: so Bob goes for love songs

Happy anniversary Theme Time Radio Hour.

By Tony Attwood

This series of articles (No Nobel Prize for Music) looks at Dylan’s compositions from the point of view of the music he wrote and the way he changed his musical style. A list of previous articles in the series is at the end.

At this point in the series, we are looking at Dylan’s compositions of 1973 – a period in which his lyrics turned away from social issues or the surreal representations of the world arond him, to being songs of love and lost love. Thus we have been looking at songs such as “Never Say Goodbye”, “Nobody ‘cept you”, and “Going going gone”. And as I noted in the title of the last piece in this series, this was a time when Bob expanded his musical approach (“Bob discovers sequences he’s never used before”) to accommodate this venture into the composition of different types of lyrics.

However, this variation of musical approach didn’t always continue as Bob got further and further into the conventional pop themes of love and lost love. (There is incidentally a third conventional theme in popular music – dance – but I don’t think Bob has ever shown much interest in that so we’ll stay with love and lost love as the themes of popular music – themes that Bob had previously largely, although not totally, eschewed in this songwriting.)

Indeed the very titles of the songs that Dylan wrote (and I am continuing to stick to the process of reviewing the songs in the order they were written, not in the order of performance or record release) we now find songs such as Something there is about you, You Angel You and On a night like this, each of which through their titles alone stress that they are about romance and relationships.

But as noted, my issue here as throughout this series is, how did Bob change his musical approach, now that he was writing almost exclusively about relationships?

“Something there is about you” was played live by Bob 26 times between 1974 and 1978, suggesting that Bob was initially keen to project his change of musical style, but eventually had had enough.

And we can hear that Bob has continued his movement away from the simple three or four chord songs of earlier times. Indeed, hearing the song performed, we can even take a guess on how he wrote the music – by sitting at the keyboard and playing the descending bass that stands out at the start and end of each verse.

We also get from time to time an interesting counter melody from the organ – again something that is rarely if ever heard in most of the earlier works.

The song itself is in simple strophic form – four musically identical verses of four lines each, with an instrumental break before the last verse. But to accommodate the descending bass line the chord sequence is unusual, and as a result, the music is also a long way away from the three-chord construction of earlier times.

This is not to argue that the chord sequence of G, Em C, Am, G is unique or difficult to play – it is not. It is just unusual for Dylan. And what is interesting is that Dylan is NOT attempting to make the song sound very different from his earlier pieces by having a sequence of chords that no one has used before. What he has done is moved further toward pop music, for this is a fairly standard pop music sequence, using the chords most commonly associated with the key of G major.

There is however, variation in the music in the third line (the sequence can be seen in more detail here)

Bm                     Em      C                   Am      G
Or is it because you remind me   of something that used to be?

but this variation goes no further and we are still firmly in the key of G major, and again all the chords fit with this key.

If we want an extreme comparison with Dylan travelling in a different direction, we may compare this with “Can you please crawl out your window” which Jochen has been examining of late on this site. At that point Dylan was travelling in seemingly every possible new musical direction at once, and not necessarily with success. Here he is venturing into new musical pathways (for him) as with the descending bass dominating the song, but still with recognisably conventional chord sequences beneath it.

In short, consciously or sub-consciously, Bob has realised that yes, there are other musical pathways to be explored, but they need to be taken one at a time, and not all at once. Hence, the standard strophic (i.e., verse-verse-verse) approach with no extra lines or sudden variations is adopted.

However perhaps because Bob did not feel he had experimented enough with “You Angel You” it hardly got an outing, just one performance in each of January and February 1990 according to the official website (although there are at least three recordings on the internet citing different locations). We might take it from this that he certainly did play the song a few times, and he wanted to continue writing love songs, but he wasn’t totally happy with each one.

What is also interesting is that Bob has returned to the three-chord accompaniment for this song – and it is none the worse for that (Desolation Row is, after all, a three-chord song). But it has alongside it a simplicity in the lyrics which seems to result in a rather un-Dylan song. The quality of this first recording is poor, but it does show how Bob was trying to see where this song could go.

Here is a very different performance with an improved quality. And do note the cheer that goes up when the audience recognises what the song is.

But there are some oddities here that we don’t normally associate with the Dylan composition. For example, the second verse opens with the same lyrical line as the first verse, while the middle 8 has the line

And more and more and more (and more)

which is fine for a pop song but doesn’t really feel like Bob. But then verse three has lyrics which are almost identical to verse two

Verse 2:

You angel you
You're as fine as anything's fine.
I just want to watch you talk with your
memory on my mind

Verse 3

You angel you
You're as fine as can be
The way you walk and the way you talk
it's the way it ought to be

And then just to rub in the fact that repetition of lyrics is the order of the day the middle 8 is repeated exactly, and then finally so is verse one.

Now, of course, pop and rock music is based on repetition – just listen to early rock n roll songs like “Don’t Knock the Rock” and you’ll hear this. Elvis’ major early hit “Hound Dog” has one verse of two lines and a chorus of two lines, and nothing more. It is a tradition that has repeated itself.

But Bob had become well known for his variety of lyrics, both in terms of themes and the actual words themselves. Repeating whole sections of songs was really never his style. Yet here he is writing a simplistic love song (“You Angel You” really is not that incredibly inventive) with a simple melody and a collection of repeats. And seemingly many people quite liked it.

Thus, we might conclude that Bob was both musically and lyrically trying to break away from his past reputation, using the lyrical themes of so much pop music (love) and the musical style of three chords and repeated lines. And if you feel I am overplaying this part somewhat, and that Bob’s compositional techniques had not done a u-turn after all, please do play “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Visions of Johanna” and focus on both the lyrics and the music. “Angel” is a composition seemingly from a different mind.

And this was not a momentary oddity in Bob’s series of compositions; the next song he composed was “On a night like this, which I will look at next time. But in short, we can say Bob Dylan was at this point in his compositional career, deliberately seeking to use the compositional techniques of pop music, rather than the traditions of folk music and his own musical inventiveness at this point in his career

Previously in this series….

No Nobel Prize for Music: so Bob goes for love songs

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