Looking for a new lyric to post at the top of the page, the RWB creative team settled on a couple of verses from Under Your Spell. It’s a slightly odd and I think poignant little song from Bob Dylan’s slightly odd 1986 album, Knocked Out Loaded. The song is actually a collaboration with Carole Bayer Sager — the only song they wrote together. She is better known for such songs as That’s What Friends Are For, and Arthur’s Theme, and collaborations with such as Burt Bacharach and Marvin Hamlisch. I thought I’d go see if she had a website and if this collaboration with Bob were mentioned at all there. Well, she does have a website, and there’s a page devoted to her collaborators, and, indeed, right at the very top of the page is the name of Bob Dylan. Here’s some of what she says about working with him on this song:

… so he called me and we arranged for a time to write at his barn in Malibu. And it was really weird. I’d say something and he’d say he liked it, but he was all the way over on the other side of the room and he was covering his paper as if I was going to look and cheat. It was the most private collaboration…. I mean it’s hard to call it a collaboration because we were never exactly doing anything together at the same time. And at the end of the day he really didn’t use a whole lot of my lyric, maybe a third, but he gave me a credit. I thought, ‘Why is he giving me a credit?’ He basically lost most of my words, but he said he wouldn’t have written it without me in the room. He was a very generous, brilliant guy, as you all know …

So there you go. I wonder if that line about letting the dead bury the dead was one of Carole’s or one of Bob’s?

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Bon mots
• Bidding has begun
• The New Bob Dylan, Mark CCCLXIV