Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (1963)
This was my first favourite Bob Dylan song. If I’m honest, it’s still No. 1. I remember putting it on a mix CD for a teenage girlfriend, imagining Dylan’s fingerpicked guitar consoling her apprehensive heart. That was my first (unfortunately, not my last) mistake. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is, as anybody with half a brain can hear, a breakup song. But I’ve never been good with lyrics: Hearing the titular refrain, 18-year-old me assumed there was nothing but comfort in the verses. I wish I could say that this was the only time this has happened. My girlfriend set me straight; maybe it was the beginning of the end, and I found myself circling back to the song like a detective returning to the scene of a crime.
How could I have missed it? The words’ meaning is as plain as an abandoned dinner: “Goodbye’s too good a word, babe,” Dylan sings. “You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just kind of wasted my precious time.” The lyrics aren’t just woebegone, they’re downright mean. Dylan’s out the door and still flinging missiles, persistent and bitter and playing harmonica.
For quite a while, I was hard on myself: I wasn’t simply a lazy listener, I was a dumb one, misinterpreting the essence of a not very complicated song. And yet maybe not. Years have gone by, now. A hundred listens – more? And slowly I’ve realized that I was not after all so mistaken. Yes, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is a song for a breakup. But it’s a love song, too. There’s an adoration lingering in All Right’s unloving lines: In Dylan’s voice and his playing, in the exaggeration of his protest and in the middle of the second verse. Like all great literature, it’s a story telling another story at the very same time. Some songs, like poems, show their shadows.
Tyler Messick and Museum Pieces – For Shame of Doing Wrong (2016)
A spectacular Richard Thompson cover by Halifax’s Museum Pieces, who will visit Toronto in November. It’s not a barnstormer of a song – it’s mid-tempo, golden and unfolding. Yet, Tyler Messick fills the number with boundless soul, as if it’s the culmination of an epic, troubled love story. There’s enough heart here to represent a young man’s whole lifetime, the better and the worse, and enough guitar, too. While Thompson is famous for his guitar playing, Messick doesn’t shy away from following the master: He sounds as if he grew up with these chords, just waiting for the chance. And he kills it. Maybe Nobel Prizes are overrated: All these singers seem to want is to win their darlings back.
Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.