I didn’t mean it.Ĩ: We’ve both been lost and had bad times – can’t we just come back together?ĩ: After all, we’ve been drifting so long.ġ0: We screwed up, we’ve cried, but the past is past, let’s move on. I’ve tried to summarise each verse as a numbered line.ġ: We loved each other so deeply for a while a long time agoĢ: But now its all over, you’ve got guilty secrets, watch out they might come back to haunt you.ģ: Can we do anything about this broken relationship? Can we get counselling? Do you want to work it out?Ĥ: I’ve also drifted away from my roots, and my family has been dispossessed too, but I’m trying…ĥ: So come on, pull yourself together, you can’t just go to ruinĦ: The demons I’ve been fighting have goneħ: And I’ve tried to pull myself back together but I’ve still got the scars – sorry if it has been really bad for you. To try and resolve this, let’s see what sort of meaning, if any we can get from each verse – and then see if it makes a coherent tale. His brain is still active, he can think all these thoughts, but he’s plodding, plodding, plodding. The two beats in each bar gives the song that plodding feel – an old man walking along the road with solid slow steps. (To be more precise there is a fair amount of pushing forward and holding back going on, so that is not exactly right, but I hope you get the idea). Then the recitation slows down, and “One time, for one brief day” is the next two bar phrase, while “I was the man for you” takes up the remaining two. “Since we loved each other and our hearts were true” is another two bars. So if we look at the opening “It’s been such a long long time” that takes up two of the eight bars. There are eight bars in each verse, but because the verses are spoken the number of syllables per line can vary enormously.
I can’t immediately think of another Dylan song that does this. The piece is musically very unusual for Dylan – it is in 2/4 meaning two beats in the bar. We might turn here to the music for enlightenment. Or is this part of the story he is telling, which if we could but disentangle it, is a real coherent story. Or is the talk of “land” symbolic of something – one might think of Israel for example. Is this some part of the abstract world, a word painting adding to the sense of loss and wandering, a sort of reflection on Dylan’s Drifter once more but now much later in life. I lost track of ’em after they lost their land That ain’t easy to understand, they may be dead by now Or third is it an allegory for something else?
Or second is it an abstract piece of music, akin to an abstract work of modern art in which one can see images within but where overall there is abstraction – it is not a picture of “a lady” or “a landscape” or “church” or whatever but merely suggestions, shapes and patterns. A sort of desperate later life “Tangled up in blue” There is a fundamental question that we face with Long and Wasted Years and which it is helpful to answer is we are looking for a meaning within the song.įirst, is it the telling of a unified story of a singular couple of people in a particular moment in their lives? And if so, is this Dylan playing his old tricks of not telling the story in sequence. But here’s the link to Reddit.(There is an index of all the songs reviewed on the home page of this site) Somebody put together a detailed compilation of lyric variations of this song that Dylan has used in concert. It’s sued in a song by Gordon Lightfoot, and in another sung by Rebe McEntire, and another by Lynn Anderson, The phrase is also used in many blues songs, and also the popular Crystal Gayle song. “Talking in your sleep” was the name of a song by the pop group The Romantics. “They’s two trains running: none of them going my way.” Blind Blake wrote, “ I been your dog, ever since I been your man.“ “Two trains” appears in Bye Bye Blues by Tommy Johnson. The word “man” – as in “the man” – appears 1,651 times in the Blues Concordance. For example, the old-school use of the word ‘saying‘ is used in dozens of old blues songs. Not direct references, but the general use of language.
Your guess is as good as mine.Īs with most songs on Tempest, the lyrics are steeped in the blues. But what about those odd verses in the middle – “lost his family” – “my enemy slammed me in the earth.” Maybe they represent, in a symbolic way the various circumstances of life that separated our protagonist from his ex-love. It’s probably not necessary to explain that Long and Wasted Years is a lament about a long-lost love, perhaps about a love story that is not completely over.
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