| Bob Dylan – Red River Shore Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I think you are right. On the surface this is a love of a girl lost, and how to deal with it, song I think the great thing about these lyrics is that you may enjoy them on several levels. Because the words are formed as if they can take on many different meanings (they are evocative and allusive like an impressionistic painting). Here's one possible suggestion: Have you experienced ANY longing slipping by and leaving you heartbroken? It doesn't have to be a girl. It could be a career and a way out of indignity and poverty, that you didn't achieve, Perhaps your childhood dreams of being a "good guy" that used your life for good and helped people was shattered as you discovered what indignities your limitations lead to and all you were left with was the dream and the contempt of people around you that only see your handicap and not your dreams (or even worse if your childhood good-guy-naiveté actually ended with "a life of crime" (see the second half of the following verse:) "Well we're living in the shadows of a fading past Trapped in the fires of time I've tried not to ever hurt anybody And to stay out of the life of crime" That interpretation gives new light to other verses as well: Some of us turn off the lights and we live In the moonlight shooting by Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark To be where the angels fly Here Dylan may be suggesting two ways to deal with your love-lost, whatever it is: 1. keeping this love as a positive dream "turn off the light and live in the moonlight shooting by" Or, 2. Letting the disappointment radicalize you as you "scare yourself (and others) to death in the dark" in order to achieve an even higher dream than the one you lost "to be where the angels fly" (and thus make you forget your pain) Isn't what what radicals all over the world do to themselves and the rest of us? Scare us all to death because they let the hurt feelings from life's disappointments fuel an even more unlikely dream (paradise or heaven for me and the chosen few, or perhaps a drug-infused fantasy world that scares your family to death and destroy your own life..., or whatever your "being where the angels fly" drug might be ... And that's just one line of thought representing who the "girl on the red river shore" might be and the impact that then have on a couple of verses! Tomorrow one might experience something else in one's own life that have the same type of feelings in it. The possibilities are endless. But the cool thing is that I'm pretty sure Dylan doesn't want you to be limited by the particular interpretation that inspired the song. Then the song could easily become KITSCH which means any type of artwork that doesn't challenge YOU and speak to the situation in YOUR LIFE, but is just something pretty that people use to forget their own life's struggle, but when they come back to their own life, nothing has changed! I think that is why Dylan has been so reluctant to interpret his own songs when interviewers ask, nor getting too deep into the details in his own life that inspired the song. I would love to hear others putting these verses into something in their life, and see what fun twist might come out of the subsequent verses, then! (p.s.! sorry about the caps. I'm not yelling, I'm just emphasizing) :) |
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