I'm just listening to Dylan's new album via NPR, which is amazing for what it is. I was listening to another one of his songs all day, though, in my head. It's a little song called "Up to Me," which you can find on the Biograph compilation album. The album is mostly stuff any fan would have heard, but there are a couple outtakes and the like, which "Up to Me" is.

It's an outtake from Blood on the Tracks, which is pretty obvious just from listening to it. It's got that guitar from another place sound, with Dylan just singing simple verses over it, each ending with "...up to me." It's so reminiscent of some other songs on the album that it's no wonder that it was left out, and, really, it wouldn't have added anything. It would have just doubled part of the album and messed up the flow. If you don't appreciate the album as it is, then probably you've never heard it, never had your heart broken, or never had any taste to begin with.

Somehow it's better for not being on the album, though. It's just out there in the lost sea of songs that never got put anywhere. It's the album without being on it, a cold dawn breaking on just the next day. It's always something real happening, but you don't know when. "Well, I watched you slowly disappear down into the officers' club/ I would've followed you in the door but I didn't have a ticket stub."

Sometimes there's just a throw away Dylan line, "In fourteen months I've only smiled once and I didn't do it consciously," and sometimes there's a bizarre image that recalls simultaneously his psychedelic era and no time in particular, "So go on, boys, and play your hands, life is a pantomime/ The ringleaders from the county seat say you don't have all that much time." It's somehow like "Idiot Wind," another Blood on the Tracks track, which is full of strange, seemingly unrelated events. Somebody who is better at analysis than I was wrote about how that's just him trying to make sense of the world.

I went to a talk in college where the professor talked about how poems need to have a turn, somwhere where meaning changes. Or something like that; I don't really remember. "Idiot Wind," though, has a pretty nice example of that just as the last chorus starts. "Up to Me" seems to have a nice one, too, though it's not so big. So, that's nice. And that's all I have for now.