“Guaranteed”: the Bob Dylan song that makes Thom Yorke cry
We all have those songs that are guaranteed to make us cry. Perhaps it’s a track that’s associated with a certain time or moment in your life, one that overwhelms you with emotion and memory each time it comes on shuffle. Maybe it’s the emotion contained within the song itself, the melancholy contained in its melodies or the vulnerability within its words. For Thom Yorke, that song comes from the discography of Bob Dylan.
Yorke has penned his fair share of tear-inducing songs for Radiohead, for whom misery has become a defining trait. There’s the devastating ‘True Love Waits’ from A Moon Shaped Pool, which pairs gentle piano twinkles with Yorke’s desperate words. “Just don’t leave,” he begs, “Don’t leave.” There’s ‘Bullet Proof … I Wish I Was’ from The Bends, which finds Yorke lamenting his own vulnerability over soft strums.
‘How to Disappear Completely’, ‘No Surprises’, ‘Give Up The Ghost’, the list goes on. Radiohead’s discography is steeped in melancholy, and Yorke’s voice has brought millions of listeners to tears. But which songs have had the same effect on the Radiohead frontman? As he revealed to Jason Thomas Gordon in The Singer’s Book, one of the songs that is “guaranteed” to make him cry is Dylan’s ‘Simple Twist of Fate’.
Alongside ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ by fellow gravelly-voiced poet Tom Waits, Yorke deemed the Dylan track one of two songs that are guaranteed to “reduce [him] to tears” every time he hears it. “Guaranteed,” he emphasised, “I can’t get through either song without falling to pieces.”
‘Simple Twist of Fate’ featured as the second track on Dylan’s 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, which also spawned his signature hit ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. But Yorke was particularly taken by the former, which sees Dylan delving into the story of a failed relationship, describing a couple’s final moments together with a bittersweet tone.
The strums that surround Dylan’s voice are just as gentle as his words, somehow containing within them the emptiness he details. He sings of a final moment spent together in the park, a walk by the canal, a saxophone in the distance, each new image only adding to the melancholy feeling. “She was born in the spring, but I was born too late,” he shrugs as the song comes to an end, “Blame it on a simple twist of fate.”
It’s a gorgeous but heart-wrenching track about a relationship that has reached its inevitable end and the empty feelings that follow. Dylan’s usual personality and poeticism are present, but the song is also a truly universal depiction of its subject matter. It contains a certain kind of melancholy that will be understood and felt by anyone who has experienced a similar break-up, perhaps even reduced to tears by its poignancy.
Yorke is no exception. It’s easy to see why he cries each and every time he hears ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, as well as why he considers it to be one of his favourite songs. It’s a gorgeous composition that demonstrates Dylan’s command over emotion and his ability to reduce Yorke to tears at any moment. Fortunately for the Radiohead singer, it’s unlikely that he’ll stumble upon the track unless seeking it out, looking to purge his emotions with the accompaniment of Dylan’s voice.
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