3. Mississippi
Bob Dylan. If there were a Mt. Rushmore of songwriters he would not be on it. He would have his own mountain. From the day as a teenager when my dad told me he sang It Ain’t Me Babe I continued to voraciously consume his music. Pay days took me to Circuit City to buy his albums and so many songs spoke to me. As I grew Mississippi was the soundtrack of living life and growing older. I still remember years before this song came out I entered college and when my parents left me at the dorm I said to them that from that day on, even when I come home, nothing would ever be the same. When Love and Theft, the album this song is on, came out on 9/11 a years later I listened to the lyric "you can always come back, but you can't come back all the way"and it hit me as I remembered that milestone moment years prior. I also can't fail to mention the seemingly prophetic lines about skies full of fire and pain falling down. Eerily relevant on that day in September 2001.
The song has so much more than those lines though. It really has it all. The ascending bass line of the chorus pulls you higher and higher and a plodding almost Johnny Cash like rhythm takes you through the song like the metronome of a pulsing old freight train. Dylan's timeworn voice fits perfectly with the lyrics dealing with mortality, pain, regret, love, loyalty, overstaying your welcome, isolation and never being able to recapture things as they once were. It is, in my mind, a perfectly written song. A life story, your life story, my life story in five and a half minutes. Very few people can accomplish that feat. The beauty of a Bob Dylan song is often in how so many of them resonate with so many people so much that you get that "he must have written that about me" feeling over and over again. I know what it means to want to look at my wife until my eyes go blind to distract my worried mind. I know how it feels to have a loyal few that sail through life with me. I don't know why he was in Mississippi a day too long, but I know the artistry of Dylan paints the portraits of our lives with words better than anyone else. Enjoy.
#Bob Dylan #Mississippi #CircuitCity #MountRushmore #9/11 #itaintmebabe
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