“Not so tender”: the Bob Dylan line that he would have changed
Not everyone who’s a great artist is necessarily going to be the greatest person to get along with. John Lennon may have had a checkered past before The Beatles that he tried to atone for, but even when musicians do despicable things, there are always going to be people like Morrissey who always claim that they have the right to behave like an absolute asshole because of what they’ve done. And while Bob Dylan has had his bouts of questionable behaviour, that hasn’t stopped him from being any less intriguing.
Ever since he first started challenging what pop music could be about in the early 1960s, Dylan has always liked messing around with what people perceive as “normal” in the pop space. Sometimes that meant making something that was overtly bad, like on Self Portrait, but other times that came with having career slumps where a lot of people jumped off the hype train, like his born-again period in the late 1970s or his run between the Traveling Wilburys and Time Out of Mind.
He may have been judgemental of others during every facet of his career, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a heart. It took him a while to open up like he did on Blood on the Tracks, but once he got there, he wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind, whether it was the raw anger he was feeling towards his ex-wife and himself or the genuine hurt that he knew he was going to feel in the wake of everything.
Then again, Dylan’s stabs at talking about romance and the opposite sex have always been hit-and-miss. Joan Baez has good reason for being pissed off at Dylan when he said that women could never be poets, and when listening to some of his early songs, it’s easy to see some of his romantic relationships sound either condescending or brow-beating depending on what time you catch him.
But he did have some moments when he could be romantic as well. ‘Lay Lady Lay’ may be one of the most overtly romantic he has ever attempted to write, but by the time he started getting out of his born-again phase, a song like ‘Sweetheart Like You’ captured him fumbling for someone who deserved so much better than the hand she’d been dealt.
Despite being the kind of person who had drafts upon drafts of some of his classic tunes, though, Dylan felt he could have done more on ‘Sweetheart Like You’ regarding the line about a woman belonging at home with someone nice, saying, “I think women rule the world, and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do or encouraged him to do. Actually, that line didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted it to. But, uh… I could easily have changed that line to make it not so overly, uh, tender, you know? But I think the concept still would have been the same.”
Although the line does still read as a bit strange coming from Dylan, it’s nice to see that he was still trying to learn as a lyricist. To paraphrase one of his own lines, the times do indeed a-change, and this was his attempt at trying to give his own perspective on romance now that he had been through a few different artistic lifetimes.
Looking at how he approached everything here, Dylan was still testing the waters of what he could with a romantic song. It wasn’t going to be easy trying to grow out of one artistic identity, but ‘Sweetheart Like You’ feels like the prototype before he could make something like ‘Make You Feel My Love’.
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