As we know from tracing Bob’s compositions through the order in which they were written, Bob liked to vary both the subject matter of his song lyrics as he varied the musical accompaniment and melody that each song was given.
However just as from the start he had certain styles and approaches for his musical accompaniments, so he also could come back to key themes in his lyrics. For example he ended 1962 by composing with a set of seven songs songs that covered topics which I have summarised as …
- Stand up and change the world
- The evils of racism
- A comic talking blues
- Lost love, moving on
- Beware when your girlfriend loves you because you are famous
- Life throws up every surprise, but life goes on
- How will you be placed at the second coming
But now in 1963 a different vision, or perhaps a different set of circumstances, occupied Bob’s mind. For after the dramatic and indeed frightening anti-war song “Masters of War” which he composed at the start of the year, Bob focused on not just one, but four separate songs on the theme of love – and more precisely the end of love and lost love.
This was a dramatic change indeed from the subject matter that had occupied Bob prior to this point, and indeed we might wonder what happened. Did someone in the record company say “I think people have had enough of war songs by now”, or maybe “Look, if you really want other people to notice your songs, write about love and lost love – not war”.
Certainly as I have often commented before, there are three dominant themes in the lyrics of folk and popular music: love, lost love and dance. And Bob has never shown much interest in dance!
So however it came about, here we get the clear impression that Bob was deliberately moving on from his previous chosen theme in his lyrics, and letting the music flow by way of accompaniment. And his chosen theme was indeed lost love.Now this really was quite a change for Bob Dylan. Certainly, as we have seen, he seemed deliberately to move from one subject to another song, after song – but this represented more than that. For this notion of changing themes is not to assert that Bob deliberately set down to write on a different subject each time he wanted to create a new song, but rather top say that is how it now happened.
But this time I think things changed – either in Bob’s personal life, or because he decided to stay with one particular theme for some other reason, perhaps thinking that with each song he still had more left to say on that subject. For stay with a theme was exactly what he did, composing three songs of leaving and a song of lost love in quick succession as we have noted: Boots of Spanish Leather, Bob Dylan’s Dream, and Farewell.
Now I find this interesting because what we have here is something different from what had gone before – three songs on the same topic, one after the other, in which Bob is clearly looking to find a different way of musically and lyrically approaching the same theme.
This of course is a much greater challenge for an accomplished composer, for instead of changing every aspect of the composition from one song to the next here he is trying to stay with the same subject (presumably one that was very close to his heart at that moment) but giving that theme a different lyrical and musical treatment.
So this sudden determination to compose three different songs all relating to the same “lost love” them suggests one of two things. Either Bob (or maybe a producer or director from the record company) had suggested to Bob that he focus on what was, after all, one of the three key subject areas of popular song, or Bob was truly so engrossed by his emotions concerning a lost relationship, that he had to write about it in three different ways.
But ultimately Bob’s inborn ability to tackle songs in a multiplicity of ways overwhelmed his desire to dwell on the lost love theme so he only wrote three song on this theme before breaking away for pastures new. And that third lost love song was, for reasons we can only guess, written under the name “Blind Boy Grunt”