The song that reminds Bob Dylan of a “serial killer”
The new Bob Dylan book The Philosophy of Modern Song is a fascinating look into the mind of perhaps the most famous songwriter of all time. The book is less of an analysis of the song’s that Dylan has chosen and more of a casual walk around Dylan’s mind with some brief detours to talk about other artists.
Whether he’s singing the praises of his previous collaborators the Grateful Dead, or openly claiming that Elvis Costello got the frantic lyrical pace of his 1978 single ‘Pump It Up’ from Dylan’s own ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (which Costello confirmed in his autobiography Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink), Dylan often lets his thoughts wander inside the pages of the book. Nowhere is that clearer than in the entry for Eddy Arnold’s 1956 song ‘You Don’t Know Me’.
“You’re not good at chewing the fat, and you don’t want anyone putting words in your mouth, so you don’t say anything. You can’t go any further in the conversation. You’re deadlocked with nothing to add,” Dylan starts off in the song’s entry. “You’ve got a great yearning and a hunger: a mad crush on someone. But she doesn’t know you. She thinks she knows you well, but she’s wrong. She’s always gotten the wrong impression. How could she know you? How could she know your wild dreams, your fantasies, nightmares, and innermost thoughts? All the things you forbid her to know? It’s just not possible.”
Dylan’s narrative takes a turn when he stops pontificating about the feeling of the song and actually acknowledges it. “A serial killer would sing this song. The lyrics kind of point toward that,” Dylan writes. “Serial killers have a strangely formal sense of language and might refer to sex as the art of making love. Sting could have written this instead of ‘Every Breath You Take’ He’s watching her with another lucky guy. Not knowing where this happens makes you think that this could totally be happening inside the guy’s head. At least until he picks up that knife. Then it’s the cold, hard facts of life.”
Despite Dylan taking the position of interpreting the lyrics as a creepy man longing for a woman, ‘You Don’t Know Me’ was actually written by Cindy Walker, a country music songwriter who had been approached by Arnold with the outline of a narrative that he wanted to be turned into a song. Dylan himself began covering ‘You Don’t Know Me’ in the late 1980s.
Check out his version down below.
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