Florida Key is the only song on Lost on the River to feature all five of the participating songwriters (well, five of six, since Dylan isn’t accounted for except in the words) and nobody else. Elvis Costello plays acoustic guitar. Jim James is on electric. Rhiannon Giddens provides the fiddle, Marcus Mumford the mandolin. Taylor Goldsmith, Dylan’s co-writer here, does lead vocals, the main acoustic guitar track, and an organ overdub in the bridge. All the boys join in on backing vocals—or so the liner notes say, though it’s hard for me to pick them out. The backing vocals in the second verse might be Jim James. Back-up in the third is Marcus. And Elvis I can’t hear at all, unless he’s doing high falsetto in the back of the right channel. In any case, that’s it: just the five of them. In that sense, then, Florida Key is the song in which the essence of the Lost on the River project is at its clearest.
Lost on the River shares something of the happiness of (most of) the Basement Tapes songs, because so much of the album deals with love in a hopeful way. And it shares some of John Wesley Harding’s moral weight (the “if you want to live outside the law, you must be honest” type, to look back to Blonde on Blonde, the album I believe to be just before Lost).
Where Lost on the River differs most, aside from subject matter, is in that it highlights the potential of an individual to act nobly. The value that the songs hold in greatest esteem is the ability to earnestly and fearlessly face up to the challenges and complications that life throws your way. Earnestness and fearlessness are the key, whether in the vows of commitment that we hear in When I Get My Hands on You (and the outtake Matthew Met Mary: “A thousand doors couldn’t keep me from you!”), or in the wistful, hard-won optimism of Down on the Bottom (“No place to go now but up”) and the title track (“One stormy day I was out at sea / The waves they rolled and tumbled over me / I spied dry land and a tall pale tree / I knew that soon that’s where I’d like to be … I got lost on the river, but I didn’t drown / I got lost on the river, but I didn’t go down / I got lost on the river, but I got found”), or in the sorrowful, reluctant resignation of Kansas City (“And I love you, dear, but just how long can I keep singing this same old song? I’m going back to Kansas City…”), or in the defiance of Quick Like a Flash (“We don’t need your opinions, take a look at us: when we find something good, we’re true to it”), or in the strength of will in Nothing to It, or in the unlikely stoicism of The Whistle Is Blowing, or in the exuberant joy and readiness of Duncan and Jimmy, or in the celebration of monogamy-against-all-odds in Married to My Hack, or in the unabashed outpourings of blossoming love in Stranger, or in the sacred, singleminded adventure narrated in Spanish Mary, or even in Diamond Ring with its pitiful narrator, who is headed straight for suffering, yet approaches it with a—yes, deluded—but still full and confident heart.
As in Down on the Bottom, Lost on the River, and The Whistle Is Blowing, our narrator is one who has been disappointed in love: “Collins Avenue, 5th Street and Main / I walk up and down but it’s all in vain / My only darling is gone…” But as in those three songs, the narrator in this one isn’t ready to let hardship get the better of him. Unlike the boy in The Whistle Is Blowing, who needs some time for reflection, our narrator here heads out, again and again, in search of the girl who has fled him. The song is full of loss and disappointment, but it ends with the narrator’s confidence unshaken; if anything, he has become still more confident, because all the pain and trouble have helped prove just how much he needs his “only darling,” and how impossible it is for the narrator to conceive of a life without her.
Lost Tapes, the making-of documentary, has a clip of Elvis Costello doing a quirky and goofy arrangement of these lyrics, but Taylor Goldsmith—like Marcus Mumford in The Whistle Is Blowing—recognized the stirring love song that the words suggested. What’s incredible to me is not only that he recognized it (because unlike When I Get My Hands on You, say, the beauty of the situation and the sentiments in Florida Key doesn’t leap straight off the printed page), but that he arranged it in such a way as to let all that strength and beauty shine bright, clear, and strong as a lighthouse beam. And, as far as I know, all that is Taylor’s work alone: as his solo acoustic rendition of Florida Key in Lost Tapes shows, everything that’s moving and lovely about the finished version is already there in the guitar part, the melodies, and the singing.
The full-band arrangement that we hear on the album reminds me of the backing that Michael Gira and various Angels of Light came up with for Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands/Niño Rojo (“essentially a double album,” quoth Gira, and as such one of my desert island discs). Gira commented: “Deciding on the final arrangements was ridiculously easy—the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff or cheap impact. So, there’s a few sounds entering and leaving at will here and there, but hopefully they simply set a context ... Niño Rojo has a few more ‘orchestrated’ songs than Rejoicing does, but that’s more by co-incidence than anything else. Again, they hopefully add color/context to the songs. In the end, they weren’t strictly necessary at all. Everything was there on tape when he performed the songs.” Just so with Florida Key. Taylor Goldsmith’s producer and bandmates added sympathetic flourishes that deepen the experience, but the songwriting miracle is Dylan’s and his co-writer’s.
Do keep in mind that every word of praise I direct Florida Key’s way is as much for Goldsmith as it is for Dylan, because I don’t think even Dylan himself would have treated the song with the care that Taylor gave it, and wherever I find the lyrics brilliant, it’s not only because of how they were written, but just as much due to the shades of meaning that Taylor’s melodies and voice bring out in the written words.
The situation the narrator is in is drawn rapidly and easily in the opening lines (no small feat for a songwriter, believe me) : “Miami woman, so fine and fair / I try and try, but I can’t get anywhere.” Then comes the setting: “I sail out into the sun / Looking for my darling, my only one / I sail all day, and when the day is done / She’s still the one I want to see.” The official lyrics say “under the sun” instead of “into,” but I hear Taylor sing “into,” and I think “into” is better, as it suggests that the narrator sets out sailing while the sun is still rising: he sails east off the coast, “into the sun,” and only quits his searching “when the day is done.”
Taylor emphasizes the poignance hidden in the first three of these quoted lines by shifting to the loveliest vocal melody on any of his (or to my ears, anyone’s) Lost on the River songs. Because the musical accompaniment is soft, there seems to be a certain ease to this act of setting out on his sailboat every day, which I think reflects the ease the narrator feels in his heart (which is to say, his heart is not divided; he never doubts whether this is the right way to be spending his energy and time).
But as I know from the stories my beloved mother told me of her sailing days in Poland, it is not easy to sail all day! And anyone reading this knows that neither is it easy to dedicate yourself to the same fruitless pursuit, day after day. Dylan’s verse is so smooth that, reading the lyrics off the page, you’d be forgiven if their impact passed you by. But Taylor’s arrangement doesn’t let you make that mistake. The narrator may be in Miami, but he’s not having an easy time of it. The outside world may seem beautiful and peaceful, but his inner world—aside from his certainty that the girl he lost is worth all this trouble—is in turmoil.
We get a better, more direct glimpse of that turmoil in the second verse. His mind can’t help but circle around memories of their parting: “My only darling is gone / Took everything and put it out on the lawn / And Jim came and got it and he gave it to John.” I imagine that Jim and John are the girl’s older brothers, rather than other suitors. I think of it like this: on the morning that she and the narrator broke up, she dragged all her stuff out of the house to emphasize the finality of their separation, and then departed. I think she did so (instead of waiting on site for her brothers to pick her up) to spare her own heart, since if a love affair has any depth at all, the one who makes up their mind to leave suffers too, even if the one who is left behind suffers more. Later that same day, the girl’s brothers come, in solidarity, to pack up her stuff and take it home. The narrator, helpless to do anything else, watches. Taylor’s melody catches the stabbing pain of that memory, and the enduring pain of the separation.
Having revisited this miserable day in his thoughts, the narrator—in the occasional self-pity that helps makes this song feel so truthful—observes, “It’s getting harder and harder to be me.” And concludes, as in the first verse, “I must find that Florida Key.” Else it’ll get even harder.
Third verse: the narrator, instead of heading out onto the water again, stays on shore and waits to see whether he’ll happen to see her boat go by: “Just standing on the curb, watching for boats / While the boys and girls pass by on their big silver goats.” Evidently this strategy doesn’t work either, though, and with the day still bright, he says, “I’m getting out while the getting is good / In my ship of steel or in my ship of wood.”
For one thing, these (“I’m getting out...”) are marvelously satisfying lines to sing (try it!). For another, they further illustrate the narrator’s determination: it doesn’t matter what kind of ship gets him out there to continue his search, as long as he can go. And as if nodding to himself, the narrator adds, “One more time I’m gonna do just like I should.” He’s girding himself. But then, true to reality, and since he is no hero or invincible warrior, but just a living (and lovelorn) boy, comes the dip: “You see, this could only happen to me.” In the garden of our adolescence, self-pity grows like weeds…
But back to those goats. I find them fascinating, because they’re Florida Key’s only surreal image. One relatively plausible interpretation is that they represent happy couples, of which you’d figure the Miami shore, a classic American vacation destination, had plenty (“And maybe fall in love, just you and me … lovely people living free upon the beach of sunny [Miami]”). As the narrator stands on the street curb by himself, waiting for his love to appear somewhere out on the sea, happy couples go together down the street, continually blocking his view. That sounds reasonable to me—but it doesn’t explain the goats. Why is it goats they’re riding? And down a Miami street, of all places? And how large are these goats that they can each hold both a young man and a young woman, riding together?
I’ll cede the stage for a minute to Steven Rineer:
“Fucking pivots in songs… Neil does it in Cortez, happens at 1:55 in Daisy Glaze, happens in the second verse of Love’s Dreams (‘wonder if there is a God?’… it kills me) … zoom in or out of initial framing of the narrative of the song… like all of the sudden Neil is talking to a lady (is he back in time? or did she get brought forward? or is it just: time doesn’t exist? dunno… best songs are like that, you never know… they always remain magical and mysterious… but strive for beauty, I guess… the gaps where your reach exceeds your grasp can be magical too… at least YOU tried, and who does? Not everybody. It’s a thin line, you got to tower over the abyss, risk failure… but that’s why it’s rare.”
And elaborating on the Dreams pivot:
“ ‘I just stepped in from New York / at 10 Aaaaa M / international airport / and now I’m here / with all my friends again / wonder if there’s a God? / you may not understand it / but a man ain’t supposed to cry…?’ What the fuck? ‘Wonder if there’s a god’ right just there?”
My friend Henn has a song called Buyer’s Remor$e, ostensibly about the awful, soul-killing routine of a dayjob he once held and hated. The first three verses are autobiographical (“Tired dog eyes and my itchy gums / My fucking blood in my white porcelain sink / Round and round and round it goes down my drain”). Then comes a lonesome refrain (“Remorse trails me like a ghoul / Such remorse, oh Lord”) and a fourth verse. But in the fourth (and final) verse, suddenly the lyrics are: “Settling down on the vetch of a wildflower / We arrive, we don’t cause a fuss / In and out and down and in, it’s the grind.” Thus, suddenly, the narrator is a honeybee. And what’s the honeybee busy with? An awful, soul-killing dayjob. “In and out and down and in,” as I hear it, refers to the comb.
I can refer you also to my favorite verse in Lonesome Day Blues: “I’m forty miles from the mill / I’m dropping it into overdrive / Set my dial on the radio / I wish my mother was still alive.”
A great pivot can take the listener a long way. You (the songwriter) throw in a sudden shift of perspective or, as Steven explained, time (“And I know she’s living there / And she loves me to this day / I still can’t remember when or how I lost my way”), and if you get it right, you shatter the artwork into hundreds of gleaming pieces. And that’s what I believe the big silver goats in Florida Key are there for. Up until the third verse, we thought we knew where we were: in Miami, by the seaside, in the sunshine, following a boy as he looks for a girl. Then we see huge goats being ridden down the street. In the next line, they’re gone, but the song is never quite the same afterward. As Steven says, it’s suddenly more magical and more mysterious.
After the third verse comes the song’s extraordinary bridge. We meet the narrator taking a short rest from his searching. I picture him sitting at a table, on some shoreline bar’s rooftop, looking out over the water; and in a rare admission of frailty, he thinks (as the lyric goes), “Need a little sunshine in my beer.” He knows that the girl’s family doesn’t like him anymore: he’s broken her heart once already, or at least he’s hurt her bad enough that she made up her mind to move out (“Took all her things and…”). And since he knows that he has lost their trust, he adds—his mind casting around for the options—“Thinking ’bout eloping.”
Then, in an insight worthy of the wise young lover in The Whistle Is Blowing, the narrator of Florida Key thinks—and after the first two lines of the bridge, the effect is like the sun coming out from behind a cloud—“Nothing’s locked. Never will be. Everything is open.” It’s among my favorite moments in all of Dylan’s work. I wrote earlier in this piece about nobility; and if the ability of this character’s mind to understand, all at once, the infinite possibility inherent in human life isn’t a sign of nobility, I don’t know what is.
There is one verse left in the song—an extended verse, the song’s longest and most important. Taylor signals this by having all the other instruments and voices drop out, so that it’s only him left, singing and picking out the rhythm quietly on guitar.
“There’s only one thing that lurks in my mind,” the narrator says. “It’s nothing here, nothing I’ve left behind / There’s something up front, something I hope to find.” The narrator of Florida Key isn’t burdened by regrets from the past. And he isn’t satisfied with the present, with what he has. The one thing that he feels he needs most—the girl’s love, and it has to be that girl’s love, not any other’s—is outside his grasp: it’s not in any of the city streets he wanders, not on the shoreline where he stands and watches the water. But it’s out on the water somewhere, in the distance, up ahead.
So: “I’m gonna set sail again tonight / ‘round the horn and in the clear moonlight.” The narrator has made the right decision—to keep searching (“everything is open”)—and so the whole world looks glorious, beautiful, promising. But because Dylan is too smart for stupid, uncomplicated optimism, he does one more pull-back, and has the narrator qualify, “Or at least I’m sure it”—(the moonlight)—“Or at least I’m sure it’s going to be” (clear, that is) “Soon as I find my Florida Key.” Not quite yet, in other words. The revelation he had over his beer gives him the strength to set out again (and not even wait until morning, as he usually does). He’s not worried about the setbacks he’s already experienced. He has to keep going, keep trying. And thus the song ends, poised at the borderline between emptiness and fulfillment, with the narrator prepared to pursue the latter instead of surrendering to the former.
The title is, of course, a pun. It refers to the Florida Keys, the actual islands, to one of which the girl the narrator loves may have gone. At the same time, it refers to the figurative key the narrator is searching for, the key to her lasting affections and to their love.
I don’t think anybody in this universe expected Florida Key to get a sequel at this late stage, but there we have it: a new song called Key West (Philosopher Pirate). In Florida Key (1966/7 vintage), the geographical point stands in for a fulfilled love which is visible but, for now, out of reach; in Key West (2020), it represents “paradise divine … on the horizon line.” There isn’t much else to connect the two songs, unless we note that both are very beautiful; but it’s a cool detail that both the girl (in Florida Key’s opening line) and Key West itself (in Philosopher Pirate’s final verse) are described as “fine and fair.”
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