58. When I Get My Hands on You

My thanks go out to T Bone Burnett for inviting Marcus Mumford to join the New Basement Tapes project. I don’t think I would have discovered Marcus’s music otherwise, since the only Mumford & Sons song I’d heard at that point was Little Lion Man, which didn’t inspire further investigation. Hearing what Marcus did with Bob’s lyrics on Lost on the River, though, got me exploring his full-time band, and finding my way into their material. I thought Babel was a charming record, but really got hooked when Wilder Mind was released half a year after Lost on the River. Their most recent, Delta, has confirmed me as a fan.

Each of the New Basement Tapes's five songwriters got an advance single released before the album came out, and by the time the team shared Taylor Goldsmith’s Liberty Street, the last of the five, I was expecting the album to be outstanding. When I Get My Hands on You was Mumford’s song, the fourth one out and even more exciting to me than the phenomenal first three. I remember thinking, as I listened for the first time, “Who in the world is this singer?!” And then, “These words don’t sound like the Basement Tapes at all.”

By then, Nothing to It (with its autobiographical elements, thematic connections to Dear Landlord, and locally roaming, not too outlandish surrealism) and Spanish Mary (an inconclusive but relatively coherent story-song) had indicated that the album wouldn’t just be based on lyric sheets from the same drawer that had held Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread. When I Get My Hands on You suggested a completely different enterprise, with its own spirit, as different from the Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding as those two are from each other. Nowhere in either of those sets of sessions could you have found a refrain like the one in this song.

So maybe now’s the time for me to share the crackpot theory/illusion with which I contextualize Lost on the River. It didn’t originate with me, I read it somewhere, but could never locate the reference again later on (ahh, the literature student’s old enemy, MQS—Missing Quote Syndrome). According to this (should one say “conveniently” ?) missing source, the bulk of the Lost on the River songs was written not in Big Pink with Tears of Rage and Santa-Fe and their ilk, but before that, when Bob was laid up in the hospital, recovering from the motorcycle accident. This instantly made sense to me. My imagination had all the supplies it needed to unfurl far and wide: Dylan in the hospital bed, looking out the window of his hospital room, penning new lyrics when Sara wasn’t visiting, thinking they would be for the next album. He had no guitar with him, so he didn’t work on the music. The music could be left for later. But when he recovered and went home, he wanted to rest, not to go into a studio; and so some friends came over, and Dylan started teaching them old favorites, and all of a sudden there were new lyrics pouring out—and how many! The muse commands the artist, not the other way around. Let the songs from the hospital be, thinks Dylan. Let’s follow what’s emerging …

Thus, I imagine Lost on the River being 1966 vintage, followed in ’67 by the Basement Tapes songs, and in autumn of that year by John Wesley Harding. And since Dylan had been too busy, too drugged up, and too overwhelmed to do so earlier, it was only after the accident that the songs of a newlywed husband came pouring out of the man: songs of devotion, promises of fidelity, songs of love lost and sought for, and of love itself, whether gained or just ahead, held on to more tightly than anything else the world had to offer. The real wedding songs.

The most moving of them, in which company When I Get My Hands on You belongs, are about 70% straight. There’s nothing hesitant, nothing obscure about “And now you know / Everywhere on earth you go / You’re gonna have me as your man.” Everywhere, not anywhere: the narrator needs a word that’s more specific, more thorough, more all-encompassing than just “anywhere.” I’m not sure Dylan has ever written better lines about love or marriage—or, at least, about the flowering of love and the magnificent, transforming beginnings of marriage—than these.

Marcus Mumford, who himself had been married less than two years when Lost on the River was recorded, recognized the essence of these lines and sang them into life. The song’s vocal track is among the most soulful I’ve heard any recorded singer deliver. And his is the only voice on the song. Burnett, Marcus, and his bandmates were wise to realize that backing vocals, which are employed often and beautifully throughout Lost on the River, would, in this case, dilute the performance. (Although, now that I check again, it’s curious: Jim James is credited with vocals, but I can’t hear him at all.)

The 30% of the song that isn’t straight is in how Dylan plays with the notion of the narrator as stalker. The song’s great animated video seizes on the aspect, while the song itself works subtly with and around it. The phrase “when I get my hands on you” is, usually, a threat: just you wait ‘til I get my hands on you, I’ll tear you limb from limb. “When I set my eyes on you” works much the same way—as the phrase normally goes, it would be guard dogs that you set against an intruder. Dylan uses these overturned images to anchor the verses, which turn out to be tender, loving, and no more obsessive than the average newlywed has a right to be. “When I set my eyes on you / Gonna keep you out of town at night” is phrased like half a threat, suggesting an overpossessive lover or, worse, an abductor; but the actual meaning is way on the other side of the spectrum. Of course the husband is going to keep his woman out of town at night. They’ve just married—they have more important business to be about, nights... and so too: “When I set my eyes on you / Not gonna be outta my sight.” No, of course not, because she is too beautiful, too lovely, too new and thrilling a sight for the young husband to have the time or inclination to look in any other direction.

In the second verse, the second and fourth lines differ by only the one word, the rhyme, “carry / marry.” There’s a great scene in Lost Songs, the documentary that accompanied the album, in which band & producer are listening to the playback of When I Get My Hands on You, and the others—Jim James particularly? or Elvis Costello? I forget—laugh out loud at how cleverly and gorgeously Marcus holds back the fourth line for one extra beat, beginning it just a little bit late, to make sure you’re paying attention. Again, in the lyrics, there’s the violent language transfigured into language of love: “gonna make you” is forceful, and “when I get my hands on you” we’ve talked about—but force her to do what? “Carry me.” “Marry me.” The twist of the language makes the actual emotional and tonal content of the lines be that much more electric as it connects.

The refrain plays along the same way. “And now you know / Everywhere on earth you go” could, in another song, end very differently: see, for instance, Eminem’s Love You More.

By the time we get to the third verse, however, all pretense at violence, or at anything that lurks or has sinister intentions, has been erased. All that’s left is disbelieving wonder and wide-eyed joy: “When I come home to you” (which, if we might stop there for a moment, is such an incredible notion when you’ve just married: that “home” no longer means the old family home, with its hang-ups and horrors and years of unfulfilled dreams and longings, but the place in which your true love awaits you, and which the two of you will build now with your own hands; and, ideally, what you create together will be something better than where either of you came from), “Gonna take you down to the riverside / When I come home to you / Gonna hold you in my arms all night.”

The lyrics and the way Marcus sings them are wrapped in an arrangement that, though its main job is to highlight the words, the vocal melody, and the incredible voice conveying them, is itself beautiful and, as if so much beauty weren’t already enough, catchy too. The drumbeat (which is often all we hear) has an R&B flavor, as befits an all-out love song; so do the processed chords which Costello sometimes lays over the fourth note of the central four-note bassline/plucked-fiddle riff. For the bars of the refrains, Jay Bellerose shifts to the ride cymbal and Costello adds a light touch of organ. The verse beat picks up a little right at the end of the song. Jim James occasionally adds a couple of dubby notes to the bassline. And that’s it. That’s all that’s required. The rest is in Mumford and Dylan's hands.