Bob Dylan Song #113: Down Along The Cove

Even now, having listened to "Down Along The Cove" over and over, I find myself in the same quandary - how in the world can I possibly analyze or even talk about this song? Decades of Dylanologists have peered into those forbidding lyrics, two minutes and twenty six seconds of mysterious allusions and strangely off-putting imagery. Even on an album that has spawned reams of discussion and debate over what exactly Dylan was onto while recording it, "Down Along The Cove" takes the absolute cake. In fact, as I type these words...

Okay, I tried to keep that up as long as I could. "Down Along The Cove" works best as a surprise after you've already listened to the rest of the album, get to this track expecting perhaps another parable-like cryptic masterpiece or morality tale disguised in plain sight, and instead you get, well, this. To be perfectly frank, even Dylan's career up to this point couldn't entirely prepare you for this song; there aren't a lot of songs this upbeat, this blunt in its meaning, and this completely over-the-moon in terms of being a love song. After all, we know what a Dylan love song sounds like up to this point - where's the stuff about ravens with broken wings? Where's the Egyptian ring, or the cliffs of wildcat charms, or the mercury mouth in the missionary times? Honestly, I would not fault anybody that heard this song for the first time and thought Dylan had recorded a cover song. It's almost disarming how un-Dylan the song is.

This song, along with its companion "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", is generally considered the appetizer for the main course that is Nashville Skyline, Dylan's way of preparing us for what would come next. I don't entirely buy that - Dylan's never really been one for sketching out a far-reaching plan to begin with, and while the rather narrow subject matter fits the general aesthetic of that album, that doesn't necessarily mean it's to be thought of in the same way. One interesting thing, though, is that both this and the next song were written in the same way (music and lyrics at the same time), a way completely different from the rest of the album (where the lyrics came before the music, a complete rarity in Dylan's career). There's going to be a lot more discussion of this both in the next post and in the Nashville Skyline series, so I don't want to delve too deeply into it now, but what I see in those last two songs is a natural extension of the songwriting process that Dylan was undergoing at the time, as he was reinventing the way he approached both lyrics and the arrangements surrounding them. After all, not every song has to be a sparse tale of bandits or Biblical stories or what have you - keeping it simple, stupid can very easily apply to love songs, as well.

Instead of the narrower idea that "Down Along The Cove" was simply pointing to the country album that apparently seems obvious in retrospect, I find it easier to think that "Down Along The Cove" spoke to the artistic reimagining Dylan was putting himself through, as he tried to find a new voice for himself after having ditched his old one. What seems to baffle some people, then, isn't so much that he looked for that new voice, as it was that of the lyrical threads he'd picked out on this album, this was the one that he chose to follow. Why would such a great artist willingly shoehorn his music into an even smaller box, singing about the moon and June and country pies and so on? Like so many other questions with Bob, that's one that's ultimately going to the grave with him; the plain fact is that he followed that thread, we got a fine album out of it, and he moved on, another step in his constant evolution complete. With "Down Along The Cove", we actually get to see that evolution in process, as Dylan grasps for the only suitable recording style to fit the lyrics he was writing. The fact that it's a song you can dance to seems to be a bonus, as well.