Isis

Any serious music fan has probably gone through that phase where the number of band names you know is greater than the music of those bands you've been able to absorb - i.e. you know Sonic Youth and Pavement and Yo la Tengo, but you only know maybe two songs each from these bands that you've been told were groundbreaking, and you are supposed to revere.

I sought out and listened to a lot of bands I was supposed to like: Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground - etc.  Of those bands, I usually like a couple of songs from each of them, but for none of them can I remember a time where I put on a whole album and just listened to it.  Almost inevitably, I like more bands that I discover through a song or album, and only later discover how influential they were.  The only person I can think of that's been an exception to this rule is Dylan.

I love Bob Dylan, without being one of those Dylan freaks who reveres everything he's ever done - he's definitely put out his share of crap.  I'm also different from many Dylan fans by not liking large sections of his most famous work - the early protest songs, for example, which are so preachy as to be almost unlistenable.  It wasn't until he decided to start playing Rock and Roll that I really start to like his music.

The song of his that has haunted my brain the most is the relatively obscure track "Isis" from his Desire album.  Desire is most known for "One More Cup of Coffee" and "Hurricane" - both great songs - but I think "Isis" stands up among his best work, period.  First off, there's the violin, which was all over Desire.  Second, it's in this waltz-time, and the drums just have a heyday with it.  But it's one of Dylan's weirdest stories - there's all this mystical imagery, but it never gets in the way of the story.  It talks about pyramids, and is equal parts Egyptian and Mexican in the reference.

The lyrics, man, where to begin:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May,
But I could not hold on to her very long.
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

Cinco de Mayo, Samson, cowboy narratives, and that's one verse in ABAB rhyme scheme.  (Not to get real English Major, but that ABAB scheme is amazingly effective - the rhymes keep coming at you from angles you're not expecting.  So when he sings: "Said I got no money he said that ain't necessary" you remember that he's rhyming with the word "ordinary" two lines ago.)

He never sang better, for my money, than on this song.  His voice is a little nasally, like all his best work, but there's an expressiveness to how he wraps his voice around the words.  Seeing on paper the line "That's when I knew that I had to go on" does not do justice to the way he sings it.  Let me put it like this; some singers are tremendous interpreters of songs, and can breathe life into a song that you thought was DOA.  That's how Dylan sings this song, as if he's trying to prove to us that he's written a masterpiece.

I love Dylan for being able to write a song about an Egyptian god and making it sound like "Tangled up in Blue" the sequel - it's like how he can write something as bizarre as "The Mighty Quinn" and still have everyone singing along with the chorus.  Everyone talks about his lyrics, but to me, it's the storyteller in him that keeps me coming back to his music,