28. The Whistle Is Blowing

A recurring complaint I saw after the release of Lost on the River was that the songs didn’t sound like 1967 Dylan. Usually a defender of Burnett & co. would appear to protest: yeah, but would you want them to? Wouldn’t it be more awkward if the band shot for that Basement sound and missed, as they inevitably would? Besides, just because the material is from 1967 (or 1966, as I like to imagine) doesn’t mean that, visited in 2014, it should be arranged to sound like it’s from 1967: and anyway, what does Dylan’s 1967 sound like? Like the Basement Tapes? Or like John Wesley Harding? And if the lyrics themselves are animated by a different spirit than either the Basement or the John Wesley Harding songs, then what do you do?

Elvis Costello seems to have kept the Bob & Band levity in mind as he worked up his share of the songs, but I love that Rhiannon Giddens, Jim James, Taylor Goldsmith, and Marcus Mumford weren’t inclined to disguise the heavy emotions of Lost on the River with a Woodstock ‘67 playfulness. I admire and enjoy both Elvis Costello’s and Jim James’ renditions of Down on the Bottom, but ultimately prefer Jim’s because, with its mournful refrain, it embraces the dismal sadness and loneliness that I believe is at the center of the song, whereas Elvis’s version, which puts more emphasis on “no place to go now but up” wouldn’t have felt out of place at Big Pink.

So although I can imagine a version of The Whistle Is Blowing that fixates on images and phrases like the cornstalk, the dog in the moon, “Oh dear me,” or the blitheness of a rhyme like blowing/going, and that therefore makes a lighthearted Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread romp out of the words, I think it’s awesome that Marcus Mumford understood how gorgeous and powerful the words would be if their heart were interpreted as heavy rather than light and free.

The two songs that grabbed me hardest on my release-day listen to Lost on the River were Kansas City (with its impeccably many repetitions of “I love you, dear, but just how long can I keep singing this same old song?”) and The Whistle Is Blowing. In the latter’s case, I was transfixed by the ending, in which the band drops out and all we hear is the chords quietly strummed, before Marcus repeats the opening verse. In the following weeks, flashier songs (like Diamond Ring and Stranger) overtook The Whistle Is Blowing in my list of favorites, but as more time passed and I listened to the album over and over and over, and my favorites settled, The Whistle Is Blowing crept right back up.

It’s a subtle song. It doesn’t have an immediately ear-catching arrangement like Spanish Mary, When I Get My Hands on You, or Duncan and Jimmy. It doesn’t grab you with a striking riff like Stranger or Quick Like a Flash. You have to really listen in. But, to that end, The Whistle Is Blowing is well-sequenced near the end of the album, two tracks short of the finale, and hot on the heels of another complicated, reflective song (Diamond Ring). Besides, by the time The Whistle Is Blowing comes along, the songs Kansas City, When I Get My Hands on You, and Stranger ought to have convinced you that when Marcus Mumford takes lead vocals, you had best listen up.

The lyrics are short and spare (just two verses and the simplest of refrains) but the arrangement (5 minutes, 16 seconds) gives them room to breathe and expand. In Marcus’s hands, “Blow, blow on” becomes a cathartic call, as it damn well would be if the departing train were carrying away your beloved. I love how the band concentrate themselves in those chords of the refrain, the drums building the tension, until the fraught, heavy feeling dissipates after “on.” The rhythm of this build-up and release approximates the sound of a train whistle, and also matches the surges of pain that the narrator is feeling, left alone by himself on the nighttime platform.

I love how the narrator’s thoughts come and go in wispy clouds. Time is loosed from its moorings like it would be throughout the songs on Blood on the Tracks eight or so years later. In the opening lines, the train is going—present progressive tense, the misery unfurling. Then we’re in the past, the narrator reflecting on the words his lover said when the sun was still up: “‘I’ll be gone by tonight,’ she told me today.” What else can you do, when you’re “sitting here yearning,” but replay the events and conversations, the words and the looks and the subtleties of tone, that led to the outcome that you wish weren’t true, and yet which now, inescapably, is? Short of death, what better sign is there that a relationship has ended, than when some conveyance, be it car, train, or boat (see Boots of Spanish Leather), carries the one that you love physically away from you?

In the second verse, the narrator goes on reflecting, stuck, in pain. “That woman—that woman’s always right.” She did leave, and she did leave “by tonight.” She had told him she would; and so she did. But the narrator hadn’t really believed it. That’s how we are: until the last moment we think we might be able to escape the doom in store for us. Occasionally we even do. But usually we don’t, and yet we’re still surprised. Thus: sardonically, unwillingly, defeated, to that train whistle, he says again, “Blow, blow on.” Go ahead. See if I care…

But The Whistle Is Blowing isn’t your typical song of heartbreak. This boy is not an ordinary one, and he’s definitely not a deluded and foolhardy one, like the narrator of Diamond Ring. For one thing, this narrator is capable, even as the flames of just-administered heartbreak lick at his clothes, even as he paces the platform of the abandoned train station, to look at himself and his situation with a little humor. “All we need is a fat storm to blow by the platform,” he muses. He’s miserable enough already; so why not pile on the misery with heavy precipitation? Normally, in a clichéd tale of thwarted love, it should be raining, but here it’s winter, so if anything, it’s going to snow. As if the night weren’t cold enough already. I picture him pacing the station, up and down, a thick winter coat on, hands in his pockets, but still shivering.

The most affecting part is the verse that opens and closes the song. The typical conclusion that someone profoundly heartbroken comes to is that their life is as good as over; that they have nothing worth living for; that they will never love again. But the narrator of The Whistle of Blowing, for all his pain, and for all his youth, is wiser than that. Rather than tumble into self-pity, he grits his teeth and remarks, “Just what’s gonna happen next… well, I’m not the one to say.” He doesn’t dismiss the possibility of long suffering ahead, of months or even years of hurt. He doesn’t deny that the relationship may never be repaired. But he doesn’t despair of hope, either. He looks up at the snow beginning to fall, at the silhouette of that dog in the moon, at the fields beyond the train station, and he sees a large world and the possibility of a long life, with all the changes, good and bad, which that life may bring.

I love that Marcus Mumford caught this aspect of the words and emphasized it not only by framing The Whistle Is Blowing with that beautiful verse, but by building the entire arrangement around it, emphasizing its wisdom with the song’s slow pace, with the vocal melodies, with the measured, weary singing (“Oh, the minutes… go slow now… and I hope…”), with his nod to Taylor Goldsmith when the time for a guitar solo came. As on Stranger, I think Taylor’s solo is fantastic; here he draws on the spirit of Jerry Garcia.