12. I Believe in You

In an interview with Wade Tatangelo, Jerry Wexler, my favorite of all Dylan’s producers, said, “I didn’t have a clue as to what [Slow Train Coming] was going to be, nor did I care. I mean, when the boss says ‘Jump’ the response is, ‘How high and when do I land?’ So it turns out to be a wall-to-wall Jesus album. I couldn’t care less. They were beautiful songs.”

As I was at work on this list, I spoke with my precious friend Isaiah Hoffman about it. He pointed out that, since my list is a personal one rather than anything claiming to be in any degree objective, the top choices were almost guaranteed to be unusual and thus, as far as the fan community at large might be concerned, divisive. He said (I paraphrase), “With an artist like Dylan, or Pain of Salvation” (his favorite band; he’s the reason I love them, or to be precise, love their recent work—I sign on around Road Salt Two) “there are simply so many 10/10 songs that, when you’re trying to figure out which ones you like best, the reasons are going to be based way more on personal connection—memories, associations, whatever—than on how well a song is written or performed. Because in those crowded top levels, everything is brilliantly written and performed. In the end, you have to rely on your heart.”

I quote Isaiah as a prelude to I Believe in You because this particular song helped give me strength in one of the saddest and most awful times I’ve lived through in my thirty-one years on earth. I Believe in You is a song of faith in defiance of everything. “I believe in you though white turn to black.” It’s somewhat akin to the famous statement Fyodor Dostoevsky made in a letter some ten years before his death, that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Dylan’s song has none of the theological questing of that remark, but it shares its insistence. “I believe in YOU,” the narrator pronounces, “no matter what THEY say.”

And although I Believe in You conveys only one side of the story—the narrator’s—the religious context suggests that the commitment and love expressed in the song are answered, manifold, by the God to whom the narrator dedicates himself and the rest of his days.

In certain ways, the narrator is strong and defiant. In others, he is humble, vulnerable, and weak. “Don’t let me change my heart,” he pleads, “keep me set apart / From all the plans they do pursue.” If we identify him with Dylan, then we have someone who is just beginning his life of faith, and who understands that it isn’t easy at the beginning—and often isn’t easy later, either—so, “Don’t left me drift too far / Keep me where you are / Where I will always be renewed.” It’s the greatest and most important thing a believer could pray for on his or her own account.

Dylan, the songwriter, has always had a way with outlaws, outsiders, drifters, the persecuted, the maligned. He writes about them with interest, love, sympathy, and respect. In I Believe in You that thematic strain meets the strength and succor drawn from faith as well as the unbelievable passion of Dylan’s 1979 and 1980. In this way it’s like In the Garden, but where In the Garden’s chief outlaw is Jesus, in I Believe in You it’s the narrator himself, and Dylan conveys the narrator’s plight in an outstandingly beautiful manner. “They look at me and frown / They’d like to drive me from this town / They don’t want me around / ’cause I believe in you.” What fantastic lines! The way Dylan sings them, each one hits so hard, and that culmination is ferocious. It’s proud, almost sneeringly so, but not malicious, since the narrator is not expecting to be rewarded for his suffering, and he doesn’t await punishment for those who have turned their backs on him. It’s just that every rejection makes him more certain of the road he is on. “Though the earth may shake me / Though my friends forsake me / Even that couldn’t make me go back.”

In the Gospel shows, and all the way through 1981, I Believe in You was the second song of the set, following Gotta Serve Somebody: a consecration of sorts, then. “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody,” says the opener; and the follow-up pronounces, “I believe in You.” Shorn of Mark Knopfler (whose fantastic guitar lines Fred Tackett played note for note throughout 1979 and 1980; I suppose Dylan himself felt they couldn’t be bettered) and the Wexler/Beckett treatment, I Believe in You live became a plain, simple platform for Dylan’s heartfelt, untrammelled singing, the organ the only other instrument of note.

I love the live versions, but I find I Believe in You prettiest and most moving on Slow Train Coming. The arrangement is like the Minneapolis Blood on the Tracks, four years later and under a chilly silver light. Dylan’s singing, despite the studio setting, is as raw-nerved, loose, and open as singing gets. I imagine that someone with a professional ear could point out the “wrong notes” Dylan hits, but there’s nothing wrong about them to me. I Believe in You is the kind of song that makes me feel profoundly grateful that humans are able to sing in the first place, and that I am living in an age that possesses recording technology, so that a vocal track Bob Dylan laid down in the summer of 1979 is here for me to listen to and be comforted by a whole forty-one years later.