The “overly tender” 1983 song Bob Dylan wished he didn’t write
Bob Dylan can be a soft romantic soul when he wants to be, but whether you see it or not largely depends on who you are.
If you were Joan Baez or Suze Rotolo, then particularly at the height of the 1960s, you saw it more than most. The outside world only saw the products of that love and not the actual sparks, events, and connections that made it, which in turn made Dylan somewhat of an enigma code to crack in the eyes of many.
It also frankly doesn’t help matters that he very much leans into the notion of being the hard and impenetrable exterior shell that proves impossible to crack. As such, when he described one of his 1983 songs as “overly tender”, it seemed a million miles away from the loving odes he had committed to his songbook before.
Was this really the same man who had written ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘Lay Lady Lay’? Clearly, by the time the ‘80s had rolled around and Dylan had been treading the boards of the business for two decades, he had become a little jaded at the whole concept of romance. Sometimes he would let the guard slip, only to go rushing back to hike it up.
Having said that, with a song name like ‘Sweetheart Like You’, what was he really expecting people to think? “Actually, that line didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted it to. I could have easily changed that line to make it not so overly, uh, tender, you know?”, he tried to offer up in a 1984 interview, as if anyone was buying it.
Essentially, he thought there were better ways of expressing his love than getting all mushy and doe-eyed. “But I think the concept still would have been the same. You see a fine-lookin’ woman walking down the street, you start going, ‘Well, what are you doin’ on the street? You’re so fine. What do you need all this for?’,” Dylan added.
The man’s writing process needs to be dissected for a whole host of reasons, but this is perhaps prime among them: why does he resist the temptation of romance so much? Well, it’s not so much that he resists it, and more that he leaves his heart on his sleeve, only to never acknowledge the imprint it leaves behind ever again.
When it came to ‘Sweetheart Like You’ in particular, there was a reason that Dylan possibly didn’t want to return to it all that often. He attracted a fair bit of criticism for the song and its arguably misogynistic treatment of women, not least in the line “You know, a woman like you should be at home/ That’s where you belong”.
In this sense, hiding under the guise of the misunderstood poet may have been more of a crafty ploy from the writer to mask the error of his ways, than it was about his romantic shyness. It proved one thing for certain above all else – Dylan may like to plead the fifth from time to time, but he is absolutely in control of every word that makes its way from the pen to the page.
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