37. Stranger

I’ve seen the notion float ‘round the Internet that the Lost on the River songs were unfinished not only musically but lyrically as well. I respectfully disagree. It’s true that T Bone Burnett gave his chosen artists the license to add or subtract or shuffle lines around (a tactic that Elvis Costello seems to have made more use of than the others, adding words or multi-line verses of his own to all of his contributions (of which don’t miss the lovely Down on the Bottom, recorded with his own band, that he released recently on Trust)). But I don’t think that means the lyrics, at the stage Bob Dylan left them in 1966 (or 1967, or whenever), were lyrics he considered unfinished, or at least any more unfinished than, say, the Simple Twist of Fate we hear on Blood on the Tracks, or Gotta Serve Somebody, which has lyrical edits just about every time it makes a new live appearance. I can’t see where on Lost of the River there is evidence of songs less developed than anything Bob Dylan released under his own name.

Marcus Mumford’s electric riff, which opens and then closes Stranger (the drums behind the beginning riff expectant and energetic, and weak and weary behind the ending), and which the vocal melody for the verses is based on, is one of my favorite riffs on a Dylan-written or co-written song. The guitar that plays it is tastefully overdriven, with a touch of country and a touch of hard rock. Before the final verse, Taylor Goldsmith delivers a classic-sounding (and presumably one-take) solo (which I can hum along to; Steven Rineer says you don’t really know a song until you can sing along to its guitar solo); Taylor also joins Marcus on vocals in the high lines of the refrain (the “she knows…” part). Rhiannon Giddens answers the thoughtful words before and after those high lines with an earworm of a fiddle riff. The low end is supplied by Jim James’ boomy bass and the two drummers’ echoing toms; higher in the mix are the snare and cymbals and (the carefully and brilliantly employed) tambourine. All together Stranger sounds like something off a rawer New Morning or more polished Desire, or like All the Tired Horses or Wigwam as delivered by a hard rock band: a great and gleaming instance, then, of the heart of the Lost on the River sound.

Marcus Mumford can captivate me delivering lyrics far less elegant, eloquent, or pointed than Stranger’s. When he sings words as tremendous as Dylan’s are here, I am nothing if not his prisoner.

I misheard two major lines of lyrics on my first several listens, before discovering that the the New Basement Tapes’ official website had the official lyrics available. In the AIY (Alter It Yourself, as it were) spirit of the Lost on the River sessions, I cling to these mishearings, and still interpret the song in their light.

The song begins with a show of strength, followed by a kind of defiance that I’m not sure how to characterize—sarcastic? proud? humble?

The first line, “Never fall in love with a stranger,” is announced like a slogan, like a truth not to be denied: something you should never do. But this supposed truth is undermined immediately, in the next line, “And that, son, they all said to me,” the narrator disassociating his own experience from the rule. That’s to start with. Among the pleasures and vulnerabilities of these lyrics are the strikingly different ways the narrator relates to the phrase that opens the song.

In the second line, we see the narrator shifting from (what turns out to have been) his impersonation of an authority figure, of some weathered sort of fellow who can presume to give someone young and inexperienced a valuable life lesson, to the very person, young and inexperienced (or so we imagine him being—at least he’s seen as one such in all “their” eyes), on the receiving end of that piece of advice, which is repeated verbatim in the third line (Marcus Mumford’s melody shifting evocatively, giving the same sentence more weight this time; in the third line, it sounds sadder), only so that it may be undermined the more fully by the stanza’s final line: “But I can’t help it if she falls in love with me.”

How I love that turn. Dylan would have been 25 or 26 when he was writing these lines, and he’s again (as he wouldn’t be in the Basement Tapes songs or on John Wesley Harding—maybe not until Slow Train Coming, even) very much the upstart who’d recently written Masters of War, Ballad of a Thin Man, and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. To borrow the words Christopher Ricks used about the Arthur Hallam of 1831, the narrator of Stranger “[observes] the letter but not the spirit of [the] injunction that he should not [fall in love with a stranger]”—it’s the other party who did the falling in love, and so the narrator can be insolently—or is it that he’s thrilled?—or is it that he’s awed?—free of responsibility, of any sense that he didn’t do what he was told.

Not that his tone indicates it would have bothered him to be rebellious even in letter, as he already clearly is in spirit. You, the listener, can stop and wonder: “Really? You can’t help it at all?” If someone’s truly intent on avoiding entering into the kind of situation where they don’t reciprocate the love that someone else feels for them, there are in fact ways they can try to weaken the effect they have on the infatuated one. It doesn’t always work, sure. But the narrator doesn’t try at all. The narrator is shrugging off responsibility that he might, in truth, have shouldered.

In the second verse, the first and third lines are, again, the browbeating phrase repeated. The narrator’s response in the second is my first mishearing, and it’s a huge one, so make of my further comments what you will. Instead of “now they’ve gone against my command” (as the official lyrics put it; I just can’t imagine who the “they” would be here—the narrator’s hands? that sits decently with the earthier interpretation of certain lines in the refrain—or is the narrator again, as he seemed to do with the “son” from the first verse, picturing himself as old and ignored by the new generation as he had ignored the generation before him?) I heard and continue to prefer “now there I’ve gone against my command.” This would have the narrator at first believing in the wisdom of the advice he was given but, without noticing how or when (which seems to be how these things happen, at least when we’re young), finding himself in violation, and surprised or dismayed by the fact. (Incidentally, I love Marcus’s pronunciation of “command.”) The surprise or dismay, in this interpretation, would then be elaborated smoothly by the fourth line, “the pain is written in my hands”—as if the narrator wanted to say, “there, I’ve gone and made a fool of myself—I was told this was stupid, and it was—right here is the pain to prove it” (“If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise / Just remind me to show you the scars”). What pain? The inevitable pain of real, deep-reaching, deep-spreading love, which this is the narrator’s first experience with—because, after all, how exactly does someone go about falling in love with anybody but a stranger? No matter how well you might think you know someone, go ahead, become their lover, and have fun finding out how well you know them then…

But all the tension of the verses, all their frustration, dissipates in what’s for Lost on the River a characteristically open-hearted and sincere blooming of the heart: “But if I can’t resist / [or] Find my way out of this” (the first line still tentative, and caressed by Rhiannon’s gentle fiddle riff; the second unable to hold back, Marcus and Taylor leaning incredibly into the “thiiiiiiiiiis”)—and then comes the explosion, the high lines of the refrain, Taylor joining Marcus on vocals because one voice is not enough (and neither, for that matter, are two; the upper-register harmony is Marcus overdubbed) to convey the magnificence of how things are now that the narrator has permitted himself to do the forbidden thing. And here’s my second mishearing, not as big as the first, a mere shifting of emphasis and poetic sense instead of a change of meaning.

The official lyrics: “She knows that our love, more than any river, flows.”

What I hear: “She knows that I love more than any river flows.”

Mishearings can sometimes improve on the original. Henn Sie, my friend the songwriter, always heard the last line in the refrain of Arctic Monkeys’ Cornerstone as “I kept my chocolates to myself” rather than Alex Turner’s (already excellent) “kept my shortcuts to myself”—which (Henn edition) would make: “I elongated my lift home / Yeah, I let him go the long way ’round / I smelt your scent on the seatbelt / And kept my chocolates to myself.” Is there any way that isn’t an improvement? The narrator pointing out not only that he’s eating chocolates while, as if merely on the side, indulging in the scent of his missing beloved; but making sure also to emphasize that he wouldn’t share any chocolate with the driver.

I think my mishearing here in Stranger is an improvement too. In the official lyrics, we have the flow of love compared with the flow of a river. This is, no doubt, a pretty image. But I think it’s more striking still to make the center of comparison the verbs, not the nouns. The way I mishear the words, it’s not that both the young couple’s love and the world’s rivers flow—which brings to my mind an image of something strong and certain and forward-moving, yes, but often leisurely, as if the volume of love/water were the issue, and after all, where the volume of water in a river is greatest—where a river is wide—it seems to move the slowest. As I hear it, the important thing is that the narrator loves his woman more than any river flows—so now, with the line like this, the point is the flow, and I’m picturing a river at its most intense, most rushing, most turbulent points. Rivers can flow pretty hard, at their hardest. But the narrator loves his woman even more than that!

The second high line of the refrain is extraordinary, a beautiful and touching rhyme: “And I’m done now. All of my intentions are exposed.” The narrator is done because he’s done the thing he shouldn’t have done (“there I’ve gone against my [own] command!”); he’s taken the step that can’t be unstepped. He has confessed. The girl knows how he feels about her: “All of my intentions are exposed.” It’s an incredible moment, and a frightening one when you’re young—or, probably, for that matter, at least to some extent, remains a frightening one forever: to allow yourself to be that vulnerable, to admit how deeply in love you are, and leave yourself thereby open to rejection, which, if that’s what follows, will hurt worse than anything else imaginable just then.

But still the refrain’s not quite over—the rhyme continues from “all of my intentions are exposed” onwards to “Not hidden in my clothes / Or inbetween my toes.” To me, the way Dylan wraps up this refrain is absolutely fantastic writing. I think I’ve written earlier, somewhere in this series, about how shaken I am when an artwork can successfully mix two different tones. That’s what Dylan does here. The first two lines of the refrain are huge, emphatic, and in the narrator’s word, “exposed” ; they are poetic but otherwise straightforward declarations of great, consuming love. But instead of leaving it at that, Dylan gives us a narrator who is able to make himself small again right away, not to play down the proclamation he’s just made, but to temper it with humanity, with modesty, with humor: for no one’s about to go looking for somebody’s intentions inbetween their toes, yet it’s such a lovely image, because that is quite a place to hide something: a spot rarely seen and rarely touched, especially by another; and if someone’s touching you inbetween your toes, your relationship is very likely to be quite intimate; and the narrator is saying that even there, even inbetween my toes, I am open and exposed to you, beloved.

“Hidden in my clothes,” now, that’s something else—on one level, it’s a clarification, and also a step along the intimacy ladder; but then also, if we think about things from a somewhat different angle, there are indeed certain “intentions” of a man toward his beloved that clothes can (partially) hide… for modesty’s sake, I’ll stop there. (But, the narrator is saying, even these—if this second way is how we interpret the line—even these, or should we say even this, is hidden no longer!)

And with what genius Marcus Mumford sets the words of the refrain to music! He reserves the most dramatic part for the two most dramatic lines, and as the narrator gets quieter and almost bashful, Mumford has the song return to the chords and vocal melodies of the pre-chorus, thus letting those two central lines to be, as it were, held in an embrace by the approach before (“and if I can’t resist”) and the settling-down after (“not hidden in my clothes”).

As the next verse begins, all that courage, strength, assurance, and vulnerability in the refrain is juxtaposed with the bravado of the verse-narrator. This narrator is the same man but in a different mood, positioning himself differently as he faces the world. “I want a tombstone pearl-handled revolver,” he suddenly announces—a non-sequitur, you would think, though I don’t believe it is—and man, what a marvelous, vivid, detailed image that is—and then, Marcus’s voice turning rough with conviction, “don’t want to meet a pale man with a halo in his hair!” (Tell me, isn’t that a cool and striking description of Jesus?—of the Jesus familiar to us from western art, in any case.) Since, in this context, seeing Jesus would mean getting shot down, I hear these lines as the narrator saying, “I want to fight, and I don’t want to lose.” Fight about, or for, what exactly? For the love he wants, wants now without reservation, without scruples: “Never fall in love with a stranger / But sometimes I simply do not care” —a statement more insolent even than “but I can’t help it if she falls in love with me.”

A second refrain, with great guitar licks from Taylor Goldsmith insinuating themselves into the spaces between the vocals, is followed by Goldsmith’s guitar solo—and, for this listener, it isn’t just “classic-sounding;” it’s one of my favorite guitar solos ever. I was raised on Pink Floyd, which instated in me a preference for emotional solos that serve the song rather than songs that exist only or mostly to serve the guitar solos—although, as long as the song isn’t completely an excuse for soloing (and I don’t think even Neil’s (occasionally maligned) T-Bone is that), I do love me the latter form too. But there’s nothing I admire so much in the world of guitar solos (regardless of length; see Sorrow on A Momentary Lapse of Reason) as a solo that’s in dialogue with the lyrics, with the vocals, with the spirit. Nick Cave calls David Gilmour’s lead playing “tonally and emotionally … simply a supercharged version of his voice—satiny, stirring and epic.” That’s much akin to what Goldsmith’s solo is to this Dylan/Mumford song and its exquisite singer. It manages somehow to be the emotional high point of a song where an incredible amount of emotive power is conveyed through the vocals and the words. For the forty-four seconds of that solo, words fall away, and it’s pure music (tone, notes, timing, and soul—and the tambourine in the background) that communicates what most needs communicating.

It’s another masterstroke for Marcus the songwriter that he follows the second refrain and its explosive coda with a quiet final verse—more of an outro, really, albeit with the structure and melody of a verse. The drums drop out almost completely, leaving only one mild beat here, another there. (Juxtaposition again; if Marcus wanted, he could be a prog rocker.) The emphasis is placed on the lyrics that close the song, which was the right way to do it (or, should I say, a right way to do it—since if there’s a Taylor Goldsmith Stranger it’s probably very different, but fantastic too), because the lyrics are stunning: “I’ve done things right pretty much all of my life / I’m not looking for any sympathy / I can run all I like away from that stranger / But somehow she will always follow me.”

The narrator cleaves, or rather tries to cleave, to the cool voice he used in the first three verses, but the tone has changed. That’s inevitable, since the situation has changed, too. The way he’s going, he can’t come back (or, if you will, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”), and he’s realized that: the bucking of the advice, the proclamations of heart-swelling love, the exposing of intentions: all this has achieved something, and the territory stretching out before the narrator is uncharted. No one can guide him through it; he knows that, and he doesn’t mind—“I’m not looking for any sympathy,” he emphasizes. He’s confiding in us, that’s all; sharing an insight, sharing something that’s bothering him. That’s partly why the verse is so touching to me; he’s not swaggering anymore, as he did in earlier verses, and he isn’t addressing his beloved in the guise of talking to himself or us, as he did in the refrain; this time he’s turned our way, like a confused but courageous little boy, not to ask help but as if just to check whether anyone’s watching, for the comfort of knowing that he isn’t quite alone, that his plight is seen and acknowledged. He’s revealing something to us that it’s an honor for us to witness.

“I’ve done things right pretty much all of my life,” he says, and I imagine his voice quavering. As for the sentiment, I believe him. For those lucky or blessed enough to have had a moderately (or, like me, inordinately) happy family life when they were children, and who have met with success in such endeavors as they first undertook, I think it is indeed possible to live into your early twenties and say, not conceitedly or defiantly, but with the conviction that comes from a wary eye passed over your deeds and which did not find among them anything truly disturbing (hence the qualification of “pretty much all of my life,” because there will always have been more or less questionable episodes, even inside the scope of what might be called a clean slate overall)—it’s possible, then, to live into your early twenties and say, essentially, “I’ve gotten things basically right so far.” But the heart of this line of lyrics is that implied, unspoken so far. The following line mentions the potential sympathy of onlookers because the narrator understands that in the realm he has entered by embarking on this love, there is room for horrid error and for abject pain. There is a dividing line: life as he knew it before he fell in love with a stranger, and life as it may be from here on in.

The song ends thus, poised at the borderline: or no, not at the borderline, but one step over it. There is no going back. “I can run all I like away from that stranger,” the narrator says—and whether he’s only contemplating running or already begun, I’m not sure, though I suspect the latter—“somehow” (what a moving word that is! how humbled the narrator is by the great mystery of a world and destiny which he now realizes he was never in control of, and neither of which, world or destiny, he may ever understand), “somehow she will always follow me.”

When Lost on the River was released, I was three weeks short of twenty-five years old. If you recall my theory or fantasy about the Lost on the River songs being written in hospital, after the motorcycle accident, that would put Bob Dylan a couple-three months past his twenty-fifth birthday when the songs were written. At that age, I wasn’t, like Dylan, newlywed, but I was beginning my first relationship since I was 19, and in the (distressingly brief) period before that relationship turned from light and promise to catastrophe, I felt like I was living Lost on the River, that its bravery, love, devotion, and humor were my own. I heard the closing lines of Stranger as a rejection of the notion of fleeing from the beloved. Since the narrator acknowledges that the stranger will always follow him, no matter how fast or far away from her he runs, he’s also acknowledging that there’s no point to running, and that he won’t do it.

And that is indeed one valid way to interpret the ending, but there are others. The girl I loved in late 2014 asked me, when we listened to Stranger once together, “Does he mean the stranger will always actually follow him, or that the thought of her will?”

This ambiguity, which hadn’t occurred to me, is among the song's key details. Which indeed? Are we to imagine the narrator, having plunged into the river, scrambling to get out the other bank now that he’s felt how cold the water is and how fast the current rolls? Are we to see him getting out the other side and taking off running, but with his beloved in eager pursuit since, after all, he holds no monopoly on commitment? But if that’s so, and he is trying to get away from her, he’s clearly aware, all the same, that what he’s doing is futile; he realizes that (presuming his behavior in the final verse is not just part of the game—I approach, you retreat; you approach, I retreat) his flight won’t be enough to dissuade her.

Or—more darkly—is the 25-year-old Bob Dylan who wrote Stranger actually an unfortunate prophet, and this song the earliest indication of the emotion and state of mind we’ll one day hear sorrowful and blossoming on I’ll Remember You, and throughout Time out of Mind, and on Long and Wasted Years? Is the narrator staring out into the expanse of wilderness, of roads and fields and mountains unmapped, and picturing what will happen when the relationship is finished, and the two of them separated? If that’s the case, then the escape he pictures is an escape not from the stranger herself, in the flesh, but from her memory. And as anybody on the other, unfulfilled side of a love like the one depicted in Stranger knows—as the lyricist himself will, in time, discover—flight from the memory of a soul-shaking love is an endeavor doomed to failure. Perhaps you won’t marry the one you love, or loved, but like it or not, you’ll marry her memory, her ghost. If you neglect or deny her in your speech, she’ll be with you in your thoughts; if you deny her in your waking life, she’ll visit your dreaming. It’s the price of vulnerability—of exposure—of love—and the narrator of Stranger may yet need to pay it.

And so the guitar riff comes around once more, and the guitar sounds the same, but the drums are weary, and wondering, and it’s a long way from there to here.