51. Ye Shall Be Changed

I don’t think what appears on the Bootleg Series (and Trouble No More) is a finished recording, at least not by Muscle Shoals standards. I think that had Dylan slated Ye Shall Be Changed for inclusion on Slow Train Coming, Wexler and Beckett would have gone back to work, and we would have had overdubbed organ, horns, backing singers, maybe more guitar lines, too. But the incomplete arrangement that was left to posterity has the basic and essential ingredients: the sunny piano to lead the rhythm, Pick Withers drumming, Tim Drummond on bass, Mark Knopfler cycling lead and rhythm, and Dylan’s outstanding vocal performance. The mood of the song, its spirit, the lyrics, and the main melodies are all there. In fact, Ye Shall Be Changed sounds so rich already that it took me years to realize that it wasn’t ready to go on Slow Train Coming just the way it is.

Occasionally I’ll let myself dream of Ye Shall Be Changed, Trouble in Mind, and Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One being mainstays of the 1979 setlists, instead of the former two never getting live airings and the last only the one (what a performance, though!) with Dylan on lead vocals (and then, later in 1980, a couple headed by the incredible Regina McCrary—speaking of whom, if you have any interest in gospel music at all, any taste for it, listen to the McCrary Sisters!). Ye Shall Be Changed live, with all the reach and fire and adventurousness of Dylan’s voice in the Gospel era, and with Fred Tackett giving his spin on the lead guitar parts, and the girls singing along with Bob, and Terry Young on the piano, would have been something indeed.

But even without a polished studio take to admire, even without any live reworking to delight in, Ye Shall Be Changed is—well, it’s #51 on this list, for one thing.

For another, I can’t think of a happier Bob Dylan song. There certainly isn’t a happier song on this list of my hundred favorites. There are funny songs, warm songs, cheerful songs, celebratory songs, but nothing quite as exuberant, optimistic, and assured as Ye Shall Be Changed. The shimmering island pop arrangement encapsulates the joyful mood—and it may also be the reason the song was left an outtake. I can’t imagine where on Slow Train Coming it would have fit; not even Precious Angel sounds this dazzlingly bright.

“Don’t have to go to Russia or Iran / Surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand,” and “ye shall be changed.” “When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough / Ye shall be changed.” Not may, or might, or could, but shall. This is, in the literal meaning of the word Gospel, the good news. The four verses look at dismal and desperate situations, all of which I imagine the narrator having lived through himself, the “you” and “ye” standing in for “I” but at the same time extending hope outwards through the example of the narrator, whose blissful melodic yelp in the refrain shows just how far out of misery and hopelessness he’s been lifted: “In the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows / The dead will arise and burst out of your clothes” (among my favorite of all Dylan couplets). I imagine the narrator dancing with the skeletons who come up out of the ground clapping as the trumpet blows, and then the light arrives, and all is complete and redeemed.

Just goes to show what you can do with four minutes of jaunty island pop, if you’ve got the imagination.

Six highlights aside from the four refrains:

1. Dylan changing the vocal melody for “You drink bitter water and, oh, you been eating the bread of sorrow.”

2. The image of the uncertain future as “like a roulette wheel spinning.”

3. Dylan getting so passionate and caught up in his delivery of “surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand” that we wouldn’t know what the line was if we didn’t have the official lyrics. 

4. The instrumental break in the middle of the song, played as if on tiptoe, the guitar and piano and bass spending a few bars in conversation, before Pick Withers brings the third verse rolling in on the snare drum.

5. The indirect reference to It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (which reminds me of Christopher Ricks’ point about how the refrain of Slow Train plays with the refrain of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall). In the old song, “The lover who just walked out your door / Has taken all his blankets from the floor.” In this one, “All your loved ones have walked out the door / You’re not even sure about your wife and kids no more.”

6. Knopfler’s guitar solo over the fade-out.