| Bob Dylan – Sign on the Window Lyrics | 12 years ago |
|
Had a crush on a college girl from Brighton who had a boyfriend. She moves with him to California, leaving him behind wistful of the love he never had but feels he has lost. Last stanza is his dream of "the good life" he wanted to have with his lost Brighton girl. |
|
| Bob Dylan – The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest Lyrics | 12 years ago |
|
The song is about temptation in this world and price one pays in the hereafter. But it also includes a subtle subtext of ambiguity, of unknowing what one's fate will be. The ethos is be helpful and good in this world, and don't worry about the world to come. Frankie Lee is clearly the one of us. Judas Priest is the tempter, seemingly helping Frankie Lee, but actually luring him into further temptation, hinting that he will get paid back in the end ("Just tell me where you’ll be”/Judas pointed down the road/And said, “Eternity!”) Frankie is lacking moral guidance ("gambler, whose father is deceased") nor does he believe in another world (("I don't call it anything"). He is confused (or misled) about the hereafter, which is referred to as a "house" by the messenger. He himself refers to the World to Come as a "house", implying no particular connection or permanence, but is corrected ("“It’s not a house...it’s a home”). The "house" is filled with further temptation ("At that big house as bright as any sun/With four and twenty windows/And a woman’s face in ev’ry one"), but that is indeed the "home" he has made for himself. He dies of thirst, because desire is something that can never be quenched. But we ultimately do not know what the hereafter holds for us. And that is the cryptic remark by "the neighbor boy" (With his guilt so well concealed/And muttered underneath his breath/“Nothing is revealed”) Given that we do not ultimately know what lies in store for us, the moral is to act good in this world without running after the pleasures of this world We don't know wherein lies Heaven or Hell, thus "And don’t go mistaking Paradise/For that home across the road.) [Again not the use of home here as something permanent.] |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.