The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
-Bob Dylan (Tryin’ To Get To Heaven)
Environment affects me a great deal,a lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: ‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work. ‘ I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time, and I think a lot of that is instilled into this record.
-Bob Dylan – about “Time Out Of Mind” (to John Pareles, Sept 1997
The life here is drained, vampire-like, from a whole slew of blues songs, it’s title probably taken from the American Folk Song “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin”.. This is “Blind Willie McTell” with a hangover, a picture of the old south, “riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane” and shaking the sugar down.
There is an extraordinary harmonica break, like the best of Dylan, where it carries on the sense of the lyrics into a place where language no longer works.
-Brian Hinton (Bob Dylan Complete Discography)
Studio version:
Continue reading Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
Well, I just drifted into it, you know. I started singing, writing my own songs some place or somewhere. I always kinda written my own songs but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs; the only person that I ever heard do that was Woody Guthrie. And then one day I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote that I performed in public was the song that I wrote to Woody Guthrie. And I just felt like playing it one night. And I played it.
~Bob Dylan (30 July 1984 – The Bert Kleinman Interview)
This is an ongoing series… I will fill in the holes as I create new posts…
Personally I knew that I hadn’t been in presence of such greatness since the three shows at The Brixton Academy in south London in March 1995. …. That night’s standout among a long list of standouts, was for this fan Tryin’ To Get To Heaven, which Bob somehow channelled from a realm of divine and poetic musicality down to us mere mortals…
~Andrew Kershaw (Isis Magazine – latest issue)..And what came next ..was both breath-taking and mind blowing: a stunning, dare it be said definitive version of Tryin’ To Get To Heaven. Bob’s vocal were fragile, tender, controlled – yet always on the edge of breaking. His piano playing just holding a few soft chords and the band proving their worth with another superb backing. In one song Bob gave us everything our hearts were longing for.
~Zac Dadic (Isis Magazine – latest issue)
The Tivoli
Fortitude Valley
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
27 August 2014
Continue reading Bob Dylan: one of the best performances from the 2014 Australian tour