A Few Remarks About Music

I am listening to Patsy Cline sing "A Poor Man's Roses" at the moment. There is a poise and precision in her singing that reminds me of Charlie Parker's alto sax playing.

On "Blood on the Tracks," Dylan acheived a certain balance between the monumental and the personal, or the giant and the miniature, that largely accounts for that album's power. Those two strands have always been important in his songwriting, but BOTT points to a future direction where the personal becomes increasingly important--raw emotion is more and more conveyed within the lapidary, polished song-structure, which at its best seems to acheive Wordsworth's definition of poetry--strong emotion recollected in tranquility.

With "Oh Mercy" and "Time Out of Mind," Dylan began to perfect a new synthesis. I think it is more fully realized on the latter album, but in both cases, unlike BOTT for the most part, Dylan seems unable to avoid cliches or ill-considered rhymes when he accentuates the personal. A moving and mostly successful song like "Standing in the Doorway" can leave you almost crying and wincing at the same time. "Trying to Get to Heaven" feels more detached and speculative, but succeeds lyrically and emotionally even more than "Standing in the Doorway" does. It seems to pay the price for this success by being less specific-feeling, though. And even the magnificent "It's Not Dark Yet" can't seem to avoid a line like "Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear." It's as though, the more honest and emotional Dylan's lyrics get, the more they threaten to become simply mundane.

These three songs are like the gestation for a fourth, an outtake from TOOM that was included on "Love and Theft" and is far and away the best song on the latter. "Mississippi" is almost totally free of the monumental--there is no bombast; the lyrics, although as apocalyptic as any of 50 other Dylan songs that earn that epithet, remain very ordinary and emotional. But there are no wasted lines, no real cliches (except the ones that, as always, Dylan strategically deploys--certainly an arguable proposition, but anyway) or phoned-in set-ups for the rhymed payoff. "Mississippi" is like the fruition of a period of transition that began with "Blood on the Tracks."

It's hard to imagine lyrics that more effectively evoke a fragile optimism about life while fully acknowledging finitude and failure than the following:

"I know that fortune is waiting to be kind
So give me your hand and say you'll be mine

The emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back,
but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long."

This song may be perfect.

But the rest of "Love and Theft" is nowhere near as cool. It mostly consists of genre-exercises with Dylanized lyrics, which makes for fascinating listening, but doesn't provide anything that rips your guts out the way "Mississippi" does.

Because, for me, all the best music is emotional and personal, I'd like to see Dylan do more songs like "Standing in the Doorway," "Trying to Get to Heaven," "Not Dark Yet," and "Mississippi." They could almost be said to constitute a genre of their own.

Now the Patsy Cline cd is over, and I'm listening to George Jones. "She Thinks I Still Care" is playing, which is probably a throw-away but still manages to be much better than just about anything else out there.