46. We Better Talk This Over

Such a bright sound for such a sad song.

Well, not sad, precisely; the words are confident, but Dylan, delivering them, sounds deflated; and there’s sincerity and tenderness—though how deeply the tenderness runs is a question—and vestiges of toughness, so that I imagine him with a suggestion of a smile (or of a sneer?) curling half his mouth inbetween the lines. It’s a tell-off, ultimately, but a nuanced one, full of mixed messages and mixed feelings, since the narrator knows he is as complicit as the woman he’s trying to bid goodbye: a tell-off tinged with regret.

The Street-Legal band is (I’ve said it before, but it does bear repeating) amazing. You know what, I’ll let you hear it from Dylan too. In 1987, an interviewer asked him whether he thought the Band were his finest backing band, and Bob answered, “Well, there were different things I liked about every band I had. I like the Street-Legal band a lot. I thought it was a real tight sound.”

We Better Talk This Over is a showcase for Alan Pasqua (who, let it be known, reprises his role as Dylan's organist (well, pianist) on Murder Most Foul!), his mellifluent keyboard part commenting on and complementing the vocal lines. Handling the song’s grime is Billy Cross on is-it-rhythm?-is-it-lead? guitar. Ian Wallace’s drumbeat straddles the space between, giving the keys and guitar room to argue, and Dylan space to soar. I love the alternating hi-hat and snare beat that lights a fire under the B-section (the couplets). I also love the way Billy Cross’s electric guitar growls its way through the ending, into the fade-out, as if it wanted to pull the same trick it does in the closing minute of Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)’s closing minute; but it can’t, it must remain confined, since in We Better Talk This Over the narrator is still trying to keep a lid on the most intense of his emotions. So the guitar growls and paces, growls and paces, hungry and dissatisfied, as the song wanders away. Only then do we get Where Are You Tonight?

As in Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, the opening lines of We Better Talk This Over cast us deep into the middle (or, rather, in this case, tail end) of a quarrel—“I think we better talk this over / Maybe when we both get sober,” said with appropriate caution, though I bet the caution was won through many a miserable drunken “talk”—but although the argument has been going on for some time by the time the song begins, We Better Talk This Over is track 4 on Side B of Street-Legal, so we more or less know what we’re in for. Actually, that’s what makes the—what shall we call it? timidity? amenability to reason? or tenderness?—so surprising. New Pony, No Time to Think, Baby Stop Crying, Is Your Love in Vain?, even True Love Tends to Forget: none of these songs lead you to expect the tone of We Better Talk This Over. So we’re back in the old fray, but in a new mood. Things are approaching their end. In the next song on the album, the lyrics will not be one side of a dialogue; they’ll be a monologue aimed at, not a living person, but a memory.

The second verse indicates a, for Street-Legal, unprecedented clarity: “This situation can only get rougher / Why should we needlessly suffer? / Let’s call it a day / Go our own different ways / Before we decay.” It takes a long journey through a shattering relationship to attain the certainty that all that’s ahead if a couple stays together is “decay,” that no reconciliation can achieve anything worth the keeping. It’s a desolate place to be, as the B-section elaborates: “You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face / We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase.” Both statements are at once, and impressively, ironic and  commiserating. There’s a sweetness in the first line of the couplet, the narrator inviting his interlocutor to a vulnerability they haven’t been in the position to allow themselves for a long time; the very sweetness of the invitation implies all the hatred and fury that has passed between these two sets of eyes before. The second line, too, expresses both a kind of tired sympathy (“Look, we’re almost done—let’s just finish up here and let time start to heal what it will heal, which, you know, is actually everything”) and still bottled-up anger (“Does my claim sound unbelievable? Yeah, I can hardly believe it myself—is it possible that all the pain we’ve heaped on each other is just going to be erased? No, it’s ridiculous!”). On paper, you can’t be sure which tone predominates; but the way Dylan sings it, we note, with relief, that it’s the resignation that’s stronger, the readiness for forgiveness, or if not forgiveness, then for a parting that, if it can’t be called peaceful or good-natured, at least makes a well-meaning half-step in those directions.

The B-section that closes the fourth verse (with its picture of late-in-the-relationship numbness: “I’m lost in the haze / Of your delicate ways / With both eyes glazed”) is also powerfully ambivalent: “You don’t have to yearn for love, you don’t have to be alone / Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home.” On one level, these are lovely, well-wishing lines, not the kind you’d expect to meet in a harrowed break-up anthem. The narrator is giving his estranged partner a push towards the door, saying, “Go, find your happiness. Don’t stay here with me where there’s only pain.” That’s one interpretation. Another is that he’s chasing her out, in the inverted way we already met once in Walk Out in the Rain (where it was much more overtly angry). If that’s the case, then “somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home,” far from a sweet or comforting sentiment, conveys the narrator's wish that the woman disappear once and for all: “There’s a place that you can call home, but it sure as hell isn’t here with me.” A third interpretation is that the couplet’s tone is accusing, as in, “You’ve already decided that I’m not the one who can cure you of your yearning and loneliness; it’s not me you’ll make your home with,” and that the narrator is trying to cover up his bitterness by reformulating it as sweetness.

In the fifth verse we get real, if understated, or side-stepped, regret and reluctance. “I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow” (listen to Dylan’s sigh in the first two words), “If I have to beg, steal, or borrow.” Then there’s reckless imagination—“It’d be great to cross paths / In a day and a half / Look at each other and laugh”—followed perfectly by the in-built pause in the structure of the verses, a beautiful but hopelessly illusory moment to entertain the thought, after which the narrator must admit, “but I don’t” (poignant hesitation here, time enough for another sigh) “think that’s liable to happen / Like the sound of one hand clapping.”

The B-section here is the only thought in the song that seems untainted by bitterness, a brief peek of light that’s nevertheless so powerful that it’s followed not by another verse of lyrics, as every other B-section so far has been, but by an instrumental verse. “Don’t think of me and fantasize on what we’ve never had,” the narrator suggests, to the woman as much as to himself. “Be grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad.” Note the pleasing, comfortable parallelism of “be grateful” and “be glad,” the consonant opening the two adjectives even matching up. But sure enough, after the light, after the instrumental verse that provides a moment of rest, we’re presented with the song’s cruelest image, as if rather than giving the conversation partners a chance to exhale and regroup, it merely gave them the time to prepare harsher invective: “Why should we go on watching each other through a telescope? / Eventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope.”

The song ends with a decisive statement (“time for a new transition”) balanced—or rather overshadowed—by an admission of ineffectualness, of helplessness, teeth gritted because there is nothing that can ease the way through the suffering that lies ahead for both parties. “I wish I was a magician”—(but I’m not, and neither are you)—“I would wave a wand / And tie back the bond / That we’ve both gone beyond”—(but I won’t, because I can’t, and neither can nor will you.) The bond will remain, a tight knot, a blot upon the past, but those who it once bound together (“two trains running side by side, forty miles wide,” as a later song puts it) will walk in their opposite directions.

And there’s the major differences between the songs of pained love on Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire on the one hand, and those of Street-Legal on the other. Here we’re at the end of the road; there’s no ring left on the finger, only its tanline.