But Desire spoke to me, at the time of its release, in a big way Someone, I can't remember who, had bought it at university and for a few weeks it became the album played late at night on those nights when conversation got out of hand and supplanted the good sense of sleep. It insinuated itself musically into my brain until I became hooked on just about everything involved in its distinctive sound world: the hooky melodies, the echoey but oh-so-right drums and bass, the resinous violin sound, those oddly complimentary voices - Dylan's abrasive, Emmylou's sweet but sometimes just on the edge of struggling to find a tune. Then I delved into the lyrics, and found myself beguiled. The personal songs, full of emotion yet strange and indirect so you had to guess at contexts and meanings, and ended up supplying them. I constructed an entire narrative around One More Cup Of Coffee which I never really believed had much to do with what Dylan meant but which I found satisfying. The theatrical songs, narratives that drew you in to their implausible and never wholly serious worlds and seemed to say something worth saying, or, rather, involved you in something worth feeling.
Today I was listening to Desire once again, in the car and was struck by how much I liked the track Joey, almost universally panned by critics over the years as a glorification of a gangster who didn't deserve the tribute. Moralising over Dylan's songs misses the point (sometimes, though possibly not in the case of those songs which genuinely involve a 'message' of some kind). In this case you just need to surrender to the laconic machismo on offer and become a less than self-aware, sentimental mafioso of the old school for as long as the song lasts. It's not a nice thing to do but Dylan is prepared to put less than comfortable things on offer. That's what this album helped me understand back then and why it opened for me a new way of listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment