Which Bob Dylan song was originally written for ‘Midnight Cowboy’?
One would assume that the world of Hollywood and the world of music would cross over more. From time to time, you get lightning in a bottle like Kendrick Lamar creating the soundtrack for Black Panther or Martin Scorsese making multiple Michael Jackson music videos, but the truth is that the two industries are just too different ever to make it work properly. One of the most surprisingly important differences is the scheduling. Most of the time, an album can be conceived, written, recorded, and mixed, depending on the time it takes for shooting locations for a movie to be finalised, so trust Bob Dylan to find a way of turning that on its head.
In the late 1960s, Dylan returned from the electric wilderness to the acoustic, folky sounds he’d emerged from. After spending the mid-1960s in a whirlwind of drugs, notoriety, and, worst of all, electric instruments, a near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966 led to an enforced, extended period of time out of music. In a strange way, Dylan welcomed this, saying at the time that he “wanted to get out of the rat race.”
Once he was well enough to return to music, he hit the ground running. 1967’s John Wesley Harding is as essential a folk album as you’ll ever hope to hear. It was also recorded in Nashville, exposing him to the latest sounds of modern country music. All this began to influence the songs he was writing for Harding’s follow-up when he received a call from an unlikely source. A call that Dylan elaborated on in an interview with Jann S Wenner for Rolling Stone in November 1969.
In the interview, Dylan states, “There’s a movie out now called Midnight Cowboy. You know the song on the album, ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’? Well, I wrote that song for that movie. These producers, they wanted some music for their movie. This was last summer. And this fellow there asked me, you know, if I could do some music for their movie. So, I came up with that song. By the time I came up with it, though, it was too late!” It’s true. For a change, it was the musician’s turn to be too slow for the Hollywood machine, which is also something of an achievement in its own right.
Would ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ work in Midnight Cowboy?
However, and this may be a controversial take, I think it’s for the best. Don’t get me wrong, both pieces of art are staggering in their way, but they couldn’t be more different. ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ is one of the most open-hearted and unabashedly romantic songs in Dylan’s entire back catalogue. Two descriptors that very much do not apply to the roughhewn, hard-edged realism of Midnight Cowboy. It may have spoken more directly to Joe Buck’s tragic “man-out-of-time” feel, but the idea of getting rid of Harry Nilsson’s unforgettable cover of ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ in favour of it is ludicrous.
In fact, the more you look at the song, the more it seems unlikely that Dylan wrote it for the movie at all. Especially when a separate interview conducted in 1971 shows Dylan refuting the claim he wrote for the movie at all, instead writing it for Barbra Streisand to sing. Above all, though, if A Complete Unknown taught us one thing about Dylan, it’s that what he says should be taken with a fistful of salt.
Whether it’s true or not, though, one thing is for sure. There is something truly funny about a Hollywood studio reaching out to one of the most popular singers of the day and finding they’re even more erratic and glacially paced in their work than they are.
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