Credit: Bent Rej

The covertly creepy song Bob Dylan said “a serial killer would sing”

Sun 25 May 2025 16:50, UK

It says an awful lot about American society that many of its greatest artists are obsessed with serial killers. They are a rare breed responsible for less than 1% of murders in the US each year, yet, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, many musicians mull over their murderous ways endlessly.

Perhaps it is simply because the depths of their depravity tap into a deeply human fascination and self-preservative desire to understand the seemingly unknowable, or maybe it is because they don’t, in fact, dwarf larger problems but are actually a symptom of the same sick society that the original vagabond mused upon in ‘Desolation Row’.

It is estimated that less than two dozen serial killers are active in the US at any given time, but maybe that’s enough of a damning statistic for artists to figure that this tiny fraction says a lot about the world at large. Richard Ramirez, who killed at least 13 people between 1984-85, once said, “Serial killers do, on a small scale, what governments do on a large one. They are products of our times and these are bloodthirsty times.”

While that is, of course, a demented justification that by no means adds even the smallest asterisk of an explanation to his horrific crimes, it is a parallel that would no doubt have drawn the attention of Dylan given how he was the master of seeing how the soot on the streets exemplifies the lager dirt of society. Dylan is a poet in a Charles Baudelaire vein. He demonstrated that with his masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone’—skewering the truth of society from the depths of the gutter.

It would seem in his studies, he also ventured beyond the narrative of the pavements and into the minds of the denizens that stroll upon them, including the serial killers, who Ted Bundy sickeningly said, walk among us: “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow”.

Studies have frequently shown that often, at the heart of society’s most horrific characters, is a deep-seated sense of insecurity. A commonly observed trait is that they feel belittled in some way and bitterly take this out on their victims. So, which song carries this aura of sinisterly seeking retribution for a chorus of laughter that only exists in the head of the songwriter?

The creepiest American ballad?

There is one classic ballad that Dylan even thinks has been written from the perspective of a serial killer. In his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan puts Eddy Arnold’s subverted crooning serenade ‘You Don’t Know Me’ under the microscope and concludes: “A serial killer would sing this song. The lyrics kind of point toward that. Serial killers have a strangely formal sense of language and might refer to sex as the art of making love.”

The ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ singer is referring to the couplet, “I never knew the art of making love / No my heart aches with love for you.” It’s a verse that has a deep sense of detachment – a trait that not only typifies serial killers but ranks highly among all psychopaths. While Arnold never publicly expressed whether there was any sinister underscoring of the song, it marks the rise of post-modernism in music that Dylan interpreted as a ballad where all is not as it seems on the surface.

This is only heightened further by the fact that it has been covered by everyone from Ray Charles to Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Emmylou Harris since Arnold and Cindy Walker first wrote it in 1955, with the potentially murderous undertone going unnoticed. That is not to say that the serial killer angle was ever originally there upon inception, it is merely the nature of pop that a kitsch tale of a paranoid guy who lets his love go unspoken, burdened by his own imagined shortcomings, and allows the object of his affection to go off with some “lucky guy”, can tap into something so much larger.

In time, perhaps influenced by the murky depths of songs like this one, Dylan would go on to be the master of postmodernist songwriting, penning misunderstood ditties like ‘Just Like a Woman’ from the perspective of a dark, unreliable narrator.

‘You Don’t Know Me’ lyrics by Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker:

You give your hand to me and then you say hello
And I can hardly speak my heart is beating so
And anyone could tell you think you know me well
But you don’t know me

No you don’t know the one who dreams of you at night
And longs to kiss your lips and longs to hold you tight
To you I’m just a friend that’s all I’ve ever been
But you don’t know me

For I never knew the art of making love
Though my heart aches with the love for you
Afraid and shy I let my chance go by
The chance you might have loved me too

You gave your hand to me and then you say goodbye
I watch you walk away beside a lucky guy
You’ll never never know the one who loves you so
No you don’t know me

It’s chilling because it doesn’t realise it is chilling. The song masquerades as just another ballad, but Dylan saw through to its sickly soul.