8. Man Gave Names to All the Animals

Man Gave Names to All the Animals, as heard on Slow Train Coming and then live between 1979 and 1981, is my personal pinnacle for the meeting of reggae and rock. I say this having heard and adored a fair amount of rock-style reggae or reggae-style rock: Bob Marley, Ijahman, Majek Fashek (Josiah King of Kings!), Wings (C Moon! So Glad to See You Here!), Led Zeppelin (D’yer Mak’er!), Bruce Cockburn, Eric Clapton, The Band (Twilight!), The Clash, Dżem, David Gilmour (About Face’s Cruise!!! One of the best songs of all time!), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Joe! Funny Face!), System of a Down (Radio/Video!), Dispatch, State Radio, The Casual Fiasco, Babyshambles, Gov’t Mule (Unring the Bell!), Devendra Banhart (Foolin’!), Lao Che (Sen a’la tren!), Matisyahu, SOJA (so much great music from this soulful Virginia band), Among Criminals, Charlie Messing, Micah Blue Smaldone, Japan’s mighty Fishmans… all in all, a fair amount… And Man Gave Names to All the Animals is really the most wonderful song I’ve heard in the genre.

Years ago, when I was first falling for Slow Train Coming, and was an active lurker on various online forums, somebody happened to ask the populous online community of the Steve Hoffman Music Corner whether anyone was aware of an album that sounded anything like Slow Train. There were a couple of interesting recommendations in the belated responses (the first took several days), like Isaac Freeman’s Beautiful Stars, but none that really sounded close, neither in sound nor in vibe. (Incidentally, that is one of my top criteria for what constitutes a Truly Great Album: that when I have a craving for the mood/feeling/sound of some album, no other album I know can come anywhere near to satisfying that craving.)

The nearest thing I’ve found to Slow Train Coming only musically is Dire Straits’ Communiqué, which figures, since it was recorded by Wexler & Beckett only a few months earlier, and since two Straiters went on to join the Slow Train Coming band. As I hear it, the best instrumental parts in Dylan’s album always fall either to Mark Knopfler or to Pick Withers, unless (1) it’s When He Returns and they’re not playing, or (2) you count the sporadic horn licks (who wrote them, I wonder? Barry Beckett?).

I mention Communiqué because, for one thing, it’s worth your time (the band’s finest, I’d say, if not Knopfler’s, which for me is Privateering), but mostly to emphasize what makes the album version of Man Gave Names to All the Animals so marvelous. The opener of Communiqué, Once Upon a Time in the West, is reggae too, and it sounds great, but it doesn’t absorb me in anything like the same way. Dylan’s song is sparer, and it’s got that amazing eerie keyboard, and the ethereal vocals from earthy backing singers, and of course Bob Dylan Himself as lead vocalist, he who’s “got the blood of the land in [his] voice.” Buttressing the musical elements is the lyrical content, which looks far, far beyond the stuff of the world we know. I love reggae when the words set to it are political (State Radio, The Clash, Gilmour’s Cruise), and often even more when the words are spiritual (Cockburn, Ijahman, Matisyahu), but most of all I love reggae when the words conjure up a world of their own, and that’s what Man Gave Names to All the Animals does, set as it is “in the beginning, long time ago.” As Expecting Rain user Two Timing Slim says, “The [vocal] melody seems ancient, somewhere from deep within the hills of Hebron.” (For another example of what I have in mind, see Micah Blue Smaldone’s song The Mule.)

Man Gave Names to All the Animals is not a favorite among online commentators on Dylan, but I’ve heard that the good people of France, Belgium, and Russia stand with me; apparently, in those countries, this is one of Dylan’s best-known and best-loved songs. Perhaps, like me, they recognize the wisdom set forth in Peter Stampfel’s ode to not taking yourself too seriously, Ass in the Air: “Stick your ass in the air in the late afternoon / When the sun goes down, you can moon the moon / Stick your ass in the air in the midnight hour / Like the moon was the sun and your ass was a flower … Stick your ass in the air, wave it wild and free / And you will bring confusion to the enemy.”

I love that on an album as hard-edged and intense as Slow Train Coming, Dylan found room for lighter songs like Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) and this one. The musical mood of Man Gave Names to All the Animals is dark, the better to fit its album context, but lyrically and where Dylan’s phrasing goes, we are offered sheer delight. This is a funny, charming, oddball song. The bear, we’re told, “liked to howl” (?) and had not only a “furry back” (true enough) but “furry hair” (!) (which reminds me, the Chinese for “yak” translates literally to furry-cow cow). In live versions, the cow is often “smoking up so much grass” instead of eating it. On the final night of the 1979 Warfield residency, after thirteen shows of relatively stable lyrics, Dylan sings, “He saw an animal leaving a muddy trail / Real dirty face and a curly tail / He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big / Ohhh, I think I’ll call it a giraffe,” which makes Regina McCrary, Helena Springs, and Monalisa Young crack up so hard that they can barely sing the refrain. Last.fm’s GreatChupon also quotes an unidentified performance in which Dylan supposedly sang, “It wasn’t too small and it wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small! HM! Think I’ll call it a, uhh [mumble mumble].”

But Man Gave Names to All the Animals ends with a dose of darkness. That moment, right in the last line, is my favorite pivot in a Dylan song. The end comes so seemingly out of nowhere yet rings so true, and calls to mind a sequence of events with import far heavier and gloomier than the nursery-rhyme naming of the first five verses; after all, the “tree near a lake” is no ordinary tree. I remember how, on my first listen to the album, the band’s sudden drop-out gave me chills that lasted well into the opening minute of When He Returns.

Live, the band dropped out in the usual place, but instead of the song ending, one of the backing singers hissed into the silence, and the band came back in for one last long refrain, in which the backing singers linger on the phrase “in the beginning” until Dylan joins them for a final, dramatic “long—time—agooooooooo…”

If you like the song, it’s impossible to go wrong with live versions, even through the not-always-wholehearted 1989-91 revival (in which Dylan experimented with full-fledged “duck,” “dog,” “cat,” and “giraffe” verses … “It looked like it goes on for a mile and a half / Ahh, I think I’ll call it a giraffe”). My personal favorites are from very early in the 1979 Warfield residency. In the all-Gospel concert arrangement, the third, fourth, and fifth refrains are played with drums and vocals only, the other instruments silent for a spell. This approach highlights the excellent singing, which is probably why Dylan eventually asked Jim Keltner (or was it that the drummer himself decided?) to keep the beat real simple. But in those first Warfield performances, Keltner used the break to go nuts, laying awesome reggae fill over awesome reggae fill while Bob and the girls sang.

Man Gave Names to All the Animals happens to be part of a great and fruitful tradition in that it’s an artwork based on, or retelling, or elaborating a story from the Hebrew Bible. There are tales in those old books that have tremendous power whether the reader (or songwriter) is a believer or not. Keeping good company with Man Gave Names to All the Animals are Antonia and Peter Stampfel’s New Adam in the Garden, the Jerry Garcia Band’s Gomorrah, Robert Hunter’s Book of Daniel (from his great Garcia-produced Jack o’ Roses record, which also happens to be the only place you can hear the title track, a top-notch yet all-but-forgotten Garcia/Hunter composition), the first lines of Dylan’s Cover Down, Pray Through, mewithoutYou’s The Angel of Death Came to David’s Room (stunning if you know the story it’s based on), and—turning from music to prose fiction—Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, which spends 1,492 pages exploring and retelling the story of Genesis’s Jacob and Joseph. Alongside Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and John Cowper Powys’s Owen Glendower, it’s my favorite novel.

Speaking of Cover Down, Pray Through, there’s something I mentioned in the When He Return write-up that bears repeating. There’s a great couplet in Cover Down that goes, “He’s the hammer of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness / From Genesis to Revelation, repent and confess.” The way Slow Train Coming ends is an exact illustration of the beginning of the second line. Man Gave Names to All the Animals is Genesis, with Adam in the garden (busy “pinning leaves,” as per the refrain of the old traditional tune that Peter Stampfel and Antonia adapted into New Adam in the Garden; but as Peter glossed this refrain, “Oh no, we’re naked!” which means the pinning happens in the myth-evening of Man Gave Names to All the Animals’s myth-afternoon). When He Returns (“He’s got plans of his own to set up his throne”) is Revelation.

9. Precious Angel

At the present stage in our lives, my wife and I are fortunate in that we rarely need to, and don’t find ourselves wanting to, ever spend more than a few hours apart. Exceptions occur once a year at most, and rarely for more than 48 hours. Maybe it’s because the separations are so infrequent that my memories of them—dreary affairs that I just want to be done with as soon as possible (for a fuller description, see Jeffrey Lewis’s wonderful Outta Town)—tend to stay clear as time passes.

One such separation was in late August 2017, when we had just moved to Xiamen. I needed to fly out to the island of Aomen, also known as Macau, to get my working visa renewed. I took John Crowley’s Little, Big with me and began it on the (45-minute) flight out. Also with me was a durian pizza to serve as dinner (I couldn’t afford a meal in Aomen), a phone that could connect to WiFi so that my wife and I could let each other know we we were fine, and my portable mp3 player and headphones. I flew out in the evening, had an appointment at the visa office early the next morning, spent another night in town, went to the visa office again the next day, and flew back to Xiamen that evening. About 48 hours, in all.

I don’t sleep well during these separations, so I had approximately 44 hours to kill. Subtract a few for staying in touch with my wife. The rest were for walking, reading, and music. I probably made it through 200 pages of the Crowley, though rather joylessly; not Crowley’s fault. As for albums, I plunged into some recent releases by beloved artists, albums that I hadn’t yet given the proper attention. In the summer of 2017, that meant Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker (which I fell in love with during that trip), Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie’s Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie (which I fell in love with during that trip), and Neil Young’s Peace Trail (which I fell in love with during that trip). The rest of the time I listened to Orphans & Vandals’ incendiary, VU/Van Morrison-inflected tear in the fabric of our cosmos, in other words their debut album I Am Alive and You Are Dead (the best [true] debut since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn?—“true” in the sense that The Angry Young Them is Van Morrison’s true debut album, not Astral Weeks, or that Tesco Value rather than Debiut is Czesław Mozil’s) (I Am Alive and You Are Dead is Orphans & Vandals’ first and also their only album, but the songwriter Al Joshua released exquisite new music in 2018 and 2020, God bless him), and Slow Train Coming.

To this day, when I listen to the Cohen, Buckingham/McVie, Neil Young, or Orphans & Vandals records, Aomen appears before me. I suppose I’d already had too long a history with Slow Train Coming for similar impressions to form in its case. But for some reason, Precious Angel merged with the scene, and now whenever I hear the studio version, I’m there again walking up and down the narrow winding streets, checking out the Chinese/Portuguese dual-language street signs, passing the casinos and the advertisements for casinos, walking to the shore and watching the ships, seeing scores of fish leaping out of the sunlit afternoon water of a bay, crossing an overpass over a busy avenue to go buy bread instead of lunch. Maybe it was all that sunlight. “Shine your light, shine your light on me.” And maybe it’s because Precious Angel is the only love song on the album that’s to a woman and not just to God, and while God was near me in that stretch of hours, my true love was not.

Whatever the case may have been, when I listen to Precious Angel now there is southern sunlight upon me, and a wind from off shore, and the memory of a loneliness that, though real and sharp enough, was tenuous and thin, since, even as I experienced it, I couldn’t but be aware that it would very likely soon be over. And so, if that was the case, why not give the majority of my spirit over to the music coursing through my ears? And so why not lose myself in Precious Angel?

Slow Train Coming is not an ordinary album, but I think Precious Angel is the strangest song on it. Slow Train and Gonna Change My Way of Thinking (and, if we look outwards to the outtakes, Trouble in Mind) have their terrific lyrical swerves, but Precious Angel trumps them all. When I haven’t heard it for a while and I listen again, I do so with astonishment and delight and with my ears fixed on Dylan’s voice, because the lyrics in the verses surprise me as much as if I’d never heard them before.

In a grand long 2007 interview with Allan MacInnis, Peter Stampfel talked about his acquaintance with Phil Ochs: “Another reason I didn’t like Phil Ochs was, he was always (adopts covetous resentful tone), ‘This year I’m going to be better than Dylan!’, and I was going, ‘Oh come on, man!’ For one thing, ‘In your dreams, kid,’ and for another thing, that wasn’t the point, the point was for Phil Ochs to be the best Phil Ochs he could be.”

Right. That’s the task of any songwriter, any artist. And on Precious Angel, Bob Dylan is being the best Bob Dylan he can. I can’t think of a single other writer in the music world, be it English or (granted limited knowledge of these latter two universes of song) Polish or Chinese, who would follow up a couplet like “Can [my friends] imagine the darkness that will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die?” with “Sister, let me tell you about a vision that I saw,” or who after saying “Let us hope [our ancestors] have found mercy in their bone-filled graves” will, in the next breath, pronounce, “You’re the queen of my flesh, girl, you’re my woman, you’re my delight” (although, come to think of it, there might be a certain alarmed worldliness in the narrator thinking joyfully of flesh a mere moment after he’d been speaking of graves filled with fleshless bones), or who would set all these rather dark images and notions to an arrangement that’s half-soul, half-island pop, and all scooter (to use the term as Antonia might), so much so, in fact, that in 1980 the band would regularly play Precious Angel even faster than it is on record…

I love the way that in Precious Angel and Slow Train, the wordy verses are balanced by a spare refrain: “And there’s a slow, a slow train coming up around the bend” there, “Shine your light / Shine your light on me” here, albeit with a beautiful, humble flourish out of the chorus: “You know, I just couldn’t make it by myself / I’m a little too blind to see.” As these latter lines go, I’ll repeat what I said about the refrain of When You Gonna Wake Up and the opening verse of Gonna Change My Way of Thinking: I don’t think such words ever stop being true. Not for me.

As for the magnificent thing that Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett made of Precious Angel in the studio, what can I tell you but “Listen and be glad” ? I think this track (fittingly the second on the album; the opening sally over, the band unfurls its wings) features everything great about every player involved with the record: Dylan singing his heart out, Barry Beckett on organ, Mark Knopfler laying down gorgeous lead after gorgeous lead, Pick Withers kicking ass with that soulful and precise touch of his, the horn riffs, the beautiful backing vocals, the rhythm changes—and the sheer length of the thing! Six and a half minutes that sound like half that!

My series has a great reader from Expecting Rain, alias twistedfloyd, who some twenty-five entries ago expressed hope that I wouldn’t neglect Precious Angel. He commented also on his love for the November 16th, 1979 performance at the Warfield, as heard on Disc 1 of Trouble No More. My feeling about Slow Train Coming songs in 1979 tends to be that they don’t match the studio versions (as opposed to 1980, in which year I think many of the live arrangements come into their own), but floyd got me to listen again and more carefully, and man! Talk about an impeccable performance. There’s a lot to like about the rawer, less fancy live arrangement. The vocals are thrilling (don’t sleep on the way Dylan delivers the final two lines), the musicians are on fire, and the song is irresistible. That a performance of such outstanding quality was merely par for the course in the autumn of 1979 boggles my mind.

11. When He Returns

My favorite album closers are those that both encapsulate the themes and sound of an album, and vary in some significant way with the songs that came before. Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat) is like that, sounding like Street-Legal: The Song, but making more room for the backing singers and ending with Billy Cross’s meteoric guitar. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Desolation Row have their softness and their length, even as the lyric style remains recognizably Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. Lost on the River #20 (Rhiannon Giddens’s and Marcus Mumford’s arrangement), while concerned with the usual themes, is one of the album’s quietest songs, and the only one that has a female narrator. Murder Most Foul returns to the key, tempo, and delivery style of opener I Contain Multitudes, but lays the sound out over a much wider plain, the seventeen-minute length giving Dylan the time to bring all of the album’s themes together into one extraordinary grand narrative. Tempest, so interested in endings of all kinds, is doomy from Duquesne Whistle on down, but Roll On John, while a farewell, is a sad and tender rather than bloodthirsty farewell.

In terms of non-Dylan favorites, Big Blood are masters of the trade. Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? works through 33 minutes of dark, glimmering, upbeat soul-rock, but concludes with a ten-minute suite that morphs from gentle, heavy-hearted folk into a Schubert cover without disengaging from the spirit of the first nine songs.

Operate Spaceship Earth Properly comes off of the planetary-arena stadium space-metal of penultimate song Queen Day, through a series of bass pulses and waves of distortion, down to the splintered, drifting, catastrophic Wishy Wishy II, which inhabits the same sci-fi sound zone as all the other songs, but sounds lost and wistful, as if the spaceship that had set out boldly into the cosmos on opener When I Was Young went off course and was left to careen into eternal emptiness.

I love the way Radio Valkyrie 1905-1917, with its dark grooves and long near-instrumentals, implodes into the quiet, windswept A Sunny Night.

Dead Songs, an uncharacteristically forthright album for the group, ends with The Archivist & The Archeologist (a top ten Big Blood song for me, and one that Jeffrey Lewis told me is “one of [his] favorite recordings” period), in which Colleen Kinsella seems to roll her heart (“like a wheel,” as per Paul McCartney) right to the listener, across a field of soulful banjo and guitar. The last minutes are lyricless vocalizations, Colleen sing-humming what all the album’s clear and thoughtful words couldn’t, after all, express.

And don’t let me get started on A Watery Down Pt. 2, the explosive psychedelic fifteen-minute closer of my favorite Big Blood album (and second favorite album “of all time”), Unlikely Mothers.

All this relates back to Dylan because When He Returns is my single favorite of Dylan’s own album closers. It does everything that I most love an album closer to do.

For one thing, it’s a great long screed to “you/I,” the character at whom most of the album’s injunctions are aimed: the narrator himself. The pronouns are fluid, with both “you” and “I” appearing, but I think the third verse (all “you”) is as much the narrator upbraiding himself (or, perhaps, the old him, who at this early juncture in the narrator’s journey of faith is still alive and well) as the second verse (all “I”) is.

Second, When He Returns is the song in which the narrator puts his focus most closely on God. In earlier songs, the narrator was busy staking out his own position (Gotta Serve Somebody, I Believe in You, Slow Train), reminding himself of the tenets of his faith and what kind of person he wants to become (Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others), When You Gonna Wake Up), and wondering how his old relationships would change in the light of new faith (I Believe in You, Precious Angel). At the end of Slow Train Coming, the narrator’s gaze begins to turn elsewhere. Man Gave Names to All the Animals is concerned, in its own way, with the beginning of things, and ends with the narrator contemplating Satan. When He Returns looks at the End Times and at God.

In addition to laying out further reminders for himself (“How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice? / How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness? … How long can you falsify and deny what is real? / How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?”), it’s like the narrator is telling the listener (and himself), “Put aside all that other stuff, all the conflict and the trouble: let me talk about the Lord that I love. Let me talk a little about what He’s like.” That means beautiful descriptions of the love that God has for us: “He sees your deeds / He knows your needs / Even before you ask.” It also means apocalyptic triumph, which depending on your predilections, can be a read as a metaphor for how God becomes the Lord of every believer’s own soul, or literal or prophetic in a wider sense.

There’s a great quote from Expecting Rain user Kle about his discovery of Dylan’s Gospel era: “In my feeling Slow Train Coming was darker, more earnest. Saved and Shot of Love were the highlights of a summer, when I found them in a second-hand vinyl store. At that time, I did not know much about the religious phase and was very surprised about the cover art. About the lively sound and the ‘happy news’ of the songs, that brought me in a good mood. I do not mean religious. Dylan sounded like someone, who is glad to have found a true life, for that he wants to work. As living in the house of his beliefs, smelling a rose. Slow Train seemed to me more introverted, lonely—and better. Here I became afraid of him. He was like a pilgrim on the street, showing what was wrong.”

That sense of darkness and loneliness is clearest on When He Returns, largely because of the song’s arrangement. After eight ingeniously arranged full-band tracks (and to my mind, no Dylan album has more complex and more interesting arrangements than Slow Train Coming), all we hear on When He Returns is Barry Beckett’s gospel piano and Dylan’s vocals. The two feed back and forth into each other, Dylan pulling Beckett this way, Beckett guiding Dylan that way, each delivering a brilliant performance.

Barry Beckett didn’t go on tour with Dylan, so the live arrangement was altered to feature Dylan on rough piano and Fred Tackett on cool, brittle-sounding guitar, but the power of Dylan’s singing never waned. It was the quietest song of the all-Gospel set, and as such gave the divided audience a chance not only to shout what was on their mind but to definitely be heard; and it was one of the most controversial, which I imagine would have served as encouragement.

On November 2nd, 1979, the second night of the all-Gospel Warfield residency, you can hear angry manly heckling now and then. At the end of one of the lines, someone (only one person) bursts out clapping. In the middle of one of Dylan’s verse-ending wails, another (or the same?) lone attendee lets out a full-throated hoot of approval, and after a couple seconds a large swathe of the crowd joins in the glad shouting and applause. Inbetween cheers and heckles (the latter more frequent), the room is dead silent in a way that I imagine only Leonard Cohen could match, during his grace-filled Grand Tour (2008-2013). A few seconds after Dylan and Tackett finish up, the room positively erupts. It’s not what you’d expect after the strained audience reactions mid-song, but goes to show how persuasive (“undeniable,” as Fred Tackett put it) the Gospel shows really were.

Performances of When He Returns from 1979 and 1980 vary from very good to superb, and include some that I like even more than the studio version, but only if I judge the two as stand-alone performances, since for me nothing compares with the studio When He Returns heard at the end of a full listen to Slow Train Coming. My favorite of the Trouble No More versions is from April 18th, 1980 in Toronto. Fred Tackett’s guitar part is gone, but there’s an organ in its place, and the song sounds just as great that way. Dylan sings as if his brow were crowned with flame.

Returning to the Slow Train Coming version, I was wondering recently whether I’m aware of any songs (or, to be more specific, recordings) that are as intense as this one: and I mean nonstop intense, from the first note to the fading strains of the last. A limitation like this disqualifies the formidable likes of Dogs (Pink Floyd), Cruise (David Gilmour), and Painted Yellow Lines (Dispatch): all three ultimately reach shores where walls of flame tower thirty feet tall, but they sail upon calm seas to get there.

Even Orphans & Vandals’ magnificent Terra Firma, eight minutes long and fierce as a whirlwind, its quiet overture like the wind picking up speed, has a softer stretch near the end in which the intensity lets up and you’re allowed to spend some time floating. The song is not a bad listen for a Dylan admirer, by the way; songwriter and vocalist Al Joshua’s phrasing, as he inhabits the narrator waking up from a nightmare (“Turn on the light. Put on the radio and the TV. Put on the kettle. Put on some clothes, for Christ’s sake. And make a cup of tea”) only to spiral back into a waking one, at the end of which Atlantis sinks and the narrator drowns—is worthy of the Emperor of Phrasing, Bob Dylan himself.

Do I know any song that can compare to When He Returns in concentrated, unrelenting emotional intensity? I’m sure each of you reading this will answer the question in a different way (and if you don’t value When He Returns as I do, you can still play the game using the song you yourself consider the height of intensity). After a good deal of thinking, I came up with three (only three!) songs that could enter the discussion. All happen to be from the 21st century.

Moving chronologically, we have Got Wings? by Big Blood, from their 2007 double album Sew Your Wild Days Tour (a studio album despite the name). It’s a Caleb Mulkerin song, featuring the evillest banjo you’ll ever hear and lyrics that, partly inaudible, are all the scarier for it; “Well, the spirit is a funny thing / It’s almost got wings / It’s almost got wings…”

Next is the nine-minute suite that closes Is This the Life We Really Want?, Roger Waters’ most recent solo album, released only a quarter century after Amused to Death, which, by the way, is an album I hated as a child; I was cool with The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and loved Radio K.A.O.S., but Amused to Death, for some reason, infuriated me (other than What God Wants; I loved What God Wants). When I was in middle school, I started to like Watching TV. I would come back to Amused to Death every now and again, unable to believe that there was a solo album by a songwriting member of Pink Floyd that I didn’t love. And the album as a whole did finally click with me in my twenty-first year. These days it’s a big favorite, but it sure took its time. But back to the topic at hand: I’m talking about Waiting for Her/Oceans Apart/Part of Me Died, a long song with seamless music that, on the album, is split into three tracks. Waiting for Her, an adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish, begins, “With a glass inlaid with gemstones / On a pool around the evening / Among the perfumed roses / Wait for her,” and moves through a series of similarly lush, poignant, and temporal/spiritual images to the transition point (Oceans Apart), after which comes my pick for the greatest of all Roger’s great list songs: Part of Me Died (“the part that is envious, cold-hearted and devious / Greedy, mischievous, global, colonial / Bloodthirsty, blind, mindless, and cheap / Focused on borders and slaughters and sheep…”).

Third, there’s Al Joshua again, in a song that’s longer than Terra Firma but even tauter and more powerful, so that from the opening strums of the acoustic guitar all the way through the final words (as in When He Returns, the arrangement is nothing but a voice and a single instrument) I am like a small wicker ball between the artist’s hands, helpless, immobile, but safe inside the confines the artist has established. The song is Skinned Alive, and it closes Disc 1 of 2018’s double album Out of the Blue. In a mash-up of dreams, waking life, and half-remembered, half-imagined boys’ adventure stories, the song narrates the birth of the love that fueled the nine years of suffering and silence that separate Orphans & Vandals’ I Am Alive and You Are Dead from Out of the Blue, which latter, as it happens, claims Red River Shore and Nettie Moore as two of its guiding spirits; to quote the press release, they “gave me stars and a moon to row towards. Their voices illuminated the dark waves around me. They filled me with strange joy.”

Three songs, then. I’ve been listening to music consciously for about thirty years, and I’ve found only three songs whose intensity can compare to When He Returns.

In the summer of 2014, I took a bus from Warszawa up to Tallinn, to spend a few days in the company of Ralf Sauter. I arrived late in the evening; he met me at the station. We took a bus to his neighborhood, Ralf pointing out the way everyone on board was enjoying WiFi. He explained that in Estonia, WiFi access, in all places and at all times, is thought of as almost a natural human right. Anyway, we reached his cozy ground-floor apartment, part of a building block that happened to be across the street from a forest (Estonia is amazing, and if work were to be found and my wife didn’t mind the cold, I would move there in a heartbeat). I got myself settled in his living room, and Ralf made some tea. I noticed that he had printed two sets of Dylan lyrics, and framed them, and hung them on his wall. I don’t remember for certain what one of them was—Wedding Song, I think—but the other was When He Returns. No, my eyes weren’t deceiving me: there were the words to When He Returns, hanging on my friend’s wall. And in that moment I felt as much at home, there at Ralf’s, as I have ever felt in my life.

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.