"Highlands" is the Best Dylan Song Ever!

by
8 January 2006

A couple weeks ago I was at my girlfriend’s sister’s house thumbing through that recent issue of Mojo with the Top 100 BOB DYLAN songs of all time. I guess they asked a bunch of famous people what their favorite Dylan songs are and came up with list of 100 entries. As I thumbed through the article my disappointment grew as I realized that my favorite didn’t make the list. A hundred songs and no one shared my opinion: That “Highlands” (from 1997’s Time Out of Mind) is the best Dylan song of all time!

OK, OK, maybe I’m overreacting, I am by no means an authority on Dylan, but I just wanted to give this sixteen and a half minute opus its due. I became totally obsessed with “Highlands” when I first heard it. On the surface it seems silly and meandering, but the lyrics are wonderfully rich drawing an awesome autobiographical portrait of an aging Dylan. His heart’s in the Highlands, but he has to live in the same strange world as the rest of us. The lyrics come off as some extended journal entry (“I’m listening to NEIL YOUNG, I gotta turn up the sound”) where Bob roams around Boston, eventually stopping in a restaurant and having this crazy DR. SEUSS-style dialogue with the waitress. It culminates in this exchange that seems to exist purely for the sake of the rhyme scheme:

She says, You don’t read women authors, do you?
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
Well, I say, How would you know and what would it matter anyway?
Well, she says, You just don’t seem like you do!
I said, You’re way wrong.
She says, Which ones have you read then?
I say, I read Erica Jong!

After which Bob sneaks out of the restaurant and back into his dream world. I love how even though it’s Dylan’s song, he can’t keep the waitress from calling him on his crap. It’s as if Mr. Jones popped up in the middle of “Ballad of a Thin Man” and said, “You are so freaking full of yourself, you snotty little brat. Get a haircut!”

But Dylan’s an old man now, and despite its wackiness the song is really just a melancholy rumination on how the closer we get to the Highlands, the more alienated we get from the rest of the world.

Filed under rock & roll song review