#19: Make You Feel My Love (by Bob Dylan)
(Cover)
After a month in the US, I’m finally back home in Buenos Aires. All the travel in recent days means I haven’t had time to write as much as I would’ve liked. So this week I’m reaching into the archive.
One of the last things I did before leaving NY was to pick up a hard drive containing a few terabytes of outtakes, roughs, refs, demos, entire shows in one wav file, backups of full recording sessions, and general detritus from the cutting room floor. Hoping I’d find something for today’s installment, I began opening folders within folders within folders. It’s endless, and a bit discouraging. Granted, I haven’t spent a lot of time on this. But a first perusal yielded very little I want anyone else to hear. Ever.
But there were a few discoveries. I was pleasantly surprised to find a version of Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love. It has a date stamp of March 4, 2019—so, not terribly long ago. But I don’t recall recording it, though I do remember learning it in 2017 for an event in Hartford, CT in support of Indivisible. The evening’s theme was “Songs of Despair and Hope”.
I know. This song hasn’t exactly been languishing in obscurity since its appearance in 1997. It’s been done, a lot, and by some very high profile artists. But I’m grateful to be living in a world where a song like this still gets that kind of coverage. It’s one of the great ones, a latter-day standard.
A love song might seem an odd choice for a political event. But I can think of few songs that convey hope (along with compassion and empathy) as well or with the same immediacy as this one. Then as now, hope is a political stance—even (especially?) if it comes in the form a love song. You might be one person, or you might be a world. Like Bridge Over Troubled Water, anyone who sings Make You Feel My Love (and means it) has to inhabit the promises it makes. Keeping them is another story.
I am among the last standing original Dylan fans...discovered him before most of the rest of the world did, saw him in a half filled theater in Newark and stood in a back alley after the show while he waited for his car (a VW) to pick him up, Suze Rotolo on his arm. I handed him a poem I wrote about Kennedy's assassination and he put it in his pocket and asked if I wanted a swill out of his cheap red wine bottle (the kind with a basket on it) Did we (my best friend and I) want to go with them to a party in Greenwich Village? We were in high school, had to get home by curfew. You did I beautiful job with this one. A joy to listen to.
You certainly have a way of making covers your own, with Dar’s “Calling the Moon” coming to mind. But even more, there are those songs that -- if you didn’t know it WAS a cover -- you’d swear it was Shindell original. “Cold Missouri Waters” and “Shades of Black, Shades of Blue” are two songs that I first heard sung by you and was shocked to find were covers.