“I’m gonna go there”: Bob Dylan’s ode to the Scottish Highlands
“Well, my heart’s in the Highlands, gentle and fair,” comes Bob Dylan’s voice in ‘Highlands’. “Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air…”
In 1997, Dylan’s comeback with Time Out of Mind followed a strangely tumultuous artistic period for the legendary troubadour when it seemed he didn’t really know what he had to offer anymore. Working with producer Daniel Lanois, however, Dylan’s new venture was a meticulous foray into everything he was once great at, with songs that revealed the chaos of his own mind.
A big part of this execution was the tech involved, which Dylan has famously objected to in the past, especially when it comes to authentic sounds and only using new advancements if the creative flow calls for it. On Time Out of Mind, this was crucial to its overall sound. “The sound is very significant to that record,” he said. “If that record was made more haphazardly, it wouldn’t have sounded that way. It wouldn’t have had the impact that it did.”
Lyrically, many of the songs contain their own stories, like the forlorn ‘Not Dark Yet’ and the dreary ‘Love Sick’, the album opener that tackles the concept of the end through themes of nothingness and despair. However, Dylan brought a touch of regional enchantment with ‘Highlands’, a repurposing of the poem ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’ by one of Dylan’s heroes, Scottish poet Robert Burns.
Using a simple blues riff, the song takes on an unconventional structure, a fitting choice considering how the version of the Scottish Highlands in the song is both a literal and a figurative, liminal-leaning space through which Dylan finds “paradise”. That said, this isn’t a linear stream-of-consciousness, but somewhere he escapes to that takes him away from the vapidity of his life.
“I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go,” he sings at the end of the first verse, returning to reality in the second verse, where he woke up faced with the “same old rat race” of “life in the same old cage”. Even when he cannot physically get to where his heart wants to be, he uses different ways to feel closer, like music, memories, and the simple act of yearning.
By the end of the song, however, Dylan concludes that merely thinking about being elsewhere is good enough, and so is the everlasting hope that he’ll one day make it back, as he put it, “There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow / But I’m already there in my mind / And that’s good enough for now.”
Dylan’s connections to Scotland are well-documented, and he previously even acknowledged a debt to the region with many of his bigger career-defining tunes, like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin”, being inspired by old Scottish folk tunes. It’s possible that Dylan’s first exposure to the musical culture was through Joan Baez, whose mother was Scottish, but the culture became a major aspect of Dylan’s work, not just aesthetically but in how he viewed the world, too.
And his long-term love and admiration can be traced back to all the flavourings he injected into ‘Highlands’, the place he’ll always be chasing in any of his endeavours, one that will forever hold onto his heart and mind, even when he’s miles away.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.