Link to Song: I Want You
James Blunt Cover: I Want You
John Mayer Cover: I Want You
What you should know about this song: This Top 20 hit single from the 1966 Blonde On Blonde album has been featured on countless other albums, including Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. Years later in 1987, Dylan revisited the song while on tour with the Grateful Dead and released an alternate version on the Dylan and the Dead album two years later. There is a lightness in the music resulting from the dynamism between the lyrics and the tune that just carriers you through the song. It’s beautiful, really. I also found it particularly interesting how Dylan briefly introduces so many different characters in the song but never brings them up again (guilty undertaker, lonesome organ grinder, weeping fathers, sleeping saviors, the Queen of Spades, and so on). If you have any insight into this, please feel free to share!
“He brought poetry into pop music and really started the whole phenomenon of the artist as composer. A lot of his songs are very beautiful, they seem to get deeper as you get older.” – Bryan Ferry*
“It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words… (It’s) the words and the music (together)—I can hear the sound of what I want to say.” – Bob Dylan (source)
*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
