60. Time Passes Slowly

Time Passes Slowly has never been played live. Thanks to Another Self Portrait, though, we have three very different versions of the song. I especially love the one released on New Morning and the one that opens Another Self Portrait, aka Time Passes Slowly #1.

The New Morning take is the most lackadaisical, which is the mood I think the lyrics ask for. As Christopher Ricks writes (and his detailed analysis of the song is, as ever, an excellent read), the performance is “rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled and unsettling, straining its musical strains, not soporific at all, at all.” I love how the New Morning band can’t keep up with the singer but doesn’t really care to try, which again is illustrative of the lyrical content. When Bob takes his fanciful flight on what Eyolf Østrem calls the “glorious piano break” between the second verse and the bridge, the band drops out altogether, casually, and only comes back in when Bob gets back to walking the dirt road. When they do join back in, it’s just as casually as when they stopped. In the second verse, the drummer is in no hurry; the guitarist is already playing, but the drums don’t start up until the second line.

Time Passes Slowly #1 is a more rigorous and “correct” performance and loses something thereby, but it’s so very pretty, with that lovely sing-along chorus, and thus whatever’s lost is gained back in another department. I prefer its alternate lyrics to the ones that made the album, too: “like a cloud drifting over that covers the day” versus “like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day.” The cloud is lazier, passing more slowly than the rose, and is less striking as it fades, which, when you’re looking for an image of something fading, is a positive.

It’s a rare Dylan song (as opposed to, say, Michael Hurley song) that indulges so completely in languor. Watching the River flow, from a year later, is a sister song, inclined towards good cheer where Time Passes Slowly is just the slightest bit mournful. Both songs turn to visions of the natural world for comfort (there the river, here the mountains), and the world answers, giving comfort where comfort is wanted; and I bet that most listeners to both these songs supply their own beloved scenery—for me, it’s the Grasse River in Canton, New York, and the Rocky Mountains as found in Bailey, Colorado.

“Time passes slowly up here in the mountains.” It can, and does, at its best. When I was a teenager I would go to one of the little mountain-encircled reservoirs near my parents’ Bailey home and read Marcel Proust, which anyone who’s read Proust knows you need time for. A few meters away, or on the other side of the reservoir, there’d be the fisherfolk who “catch the wild fishes who flow through the stream” (or the fishes seeded in the reservoir, what have you). “Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream”—or in fiction, which has a lot in common with dreams.

After the first verse, the narrator is never quite as contented again, instead mixing contentment with sadness and (a perhaps undesired) lassitude. The second verse is gorgeous—so peaceful, so beautiful—but it’s a scene from the past. “Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good looking”—once, but no longer. It was lovely while it lasted. The two were close, and surely happy in their way: “We sat in her kitchen while her mama was cooking / Staring out the window to the stars high above.” Again, I can imagine the very kitchen, the very window, the very stars: we had a place to sit in our Bailey kitchen by the window, and sure enough, if the lights were dim or off indoors you could look up at the stars outside. I never got to sit there with a sweetheart, but the way Bob sings Time Passes Slowly is so intimate that it makes me feel like I did. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love.”

The bridge explains why it’s okay to sit and wait in the mountains, to go fishing, to dream: because there are no reasons to go anywhere else. The narrator lists all the uninteresting directions defiantly, but that may be a front. Having no reason to go literally “anywhere” (Ricks: “You name it, I’ll disclaim it”) is a common symptom of unhappiness. Nor does the final verse resolve the contradiction. Time is passing slowly, but sure enough, it’s simultaneously, always, all the while, for all of us, fading away.

For an incredible take on a similar theme, see Micah Blue Smaldone’s song Time, off The Ring of the Rise, one of my all-time favorite albums. (Time was also covered by U.S. Girls on their acclaimed record In a Poem Unlimited—not that Micah was often mentioned in the reviews. But then he doesn’t do it for the glory.) The mood in Micah’s song is different, but the observations are made just as piercingly. “When there is nothing,” the narrator grieves, “there is still time” (and it passes slowly), “mountains of time … oceans of time.”

Yet, as a later verse (with Colleen Kinsella singing back-up!) reminds the listener, “When there is something”—a love, a dream, a good family, a good community, whatever rare, sweet, and precious thing it might be—“there is no time. Canyons of time.” And Micah Blue Smaldone, embodying the philosophical narrator, whoops demonically, and the righteous guitar riff comes ripping through the mix like an avalanche down Time Passes Slowly’s mountains.