‘One More Cup of Coffee’: The mystical song Bob Dylan said came from “someplace else”
Bob Dylan has always been renowned for his ability as a wordsmith. No matter what he is writing about, whether it’s a specific emotion, moment or problem with the world, he can lay it all out in a way that is easy to access and yet profoundly poetic. His way of using words means that his narrative-driven songs really take the listener on a journey, and one of the best examples of this is the track ‘One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)’.
A lot of Dylan’s music tends to transport us. His lyricism, ethereal voice, and gorgeous music have a real transcending quality. A lot of the time, it doesn’t feel like he is singing to us, but instead, we are next to him, and he is simply describing what’s happening. On this track, we get exactly that, as Dylan tells the story about meeting a travelling girl and having to leave her.
“I’ll never forget this one man played Russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber,” wrote Dylan when describing some of his experiences at travelling celebrations, “Anyway, things went on and it was time for me to go. They said, ‘What do you want Bob, as you’re leaving us?’ I just asked for a cup of coffee for the road. They put it in a bag and they gave it to me. And I was standing there looking out the ocean, and it was like [I was] looking at the valley below where I was standing.”
Dylan was always a fan of meeting people on the outside of civilisation. He never fit in much in his home town and continually wrote from the point of view of being an outcast. Even as he rose to fame, he still constantly saw himself as an outcast, which is likely why he enjoyed connecting with people at these ceremonies.
“When I left there, man, I knew one thing: I had to get out there and not come back,” he said when speaking about his hometown. He didn’t get along with the people there and could never find a home for himself. That resonated within his music, as one of his most famous tracks, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ talks about the difficulty and settling when it feels like you don’t have a home.
The reason all of this information is important is that while ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ was inspired by real people and was the by-product of real events he had been to, Bob Dylan confirmed that when he wrote the song, it came passively, as if the words were flowing through him. “My feeling about the song was that the verses came from someplace else,” he said, “’Valley Below’ could mean anything.”
Whether he knew it or not, he would have been writing from a facet deep within him, one that didn’t only want him to tell the stories of these travellers but that could relate to them as well. The result is one of his greatest and most moving tracks, drenched in narrative and emotion.
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