I don’t have much to say about this song, recorded in March 2002 and included on the soundtrack for the film version of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a film that I’ve never seen because my aversion to Sandra Bullock is exacerbated by an aversion to Ashley Judd. The song is a waltz (a rarity for Dylan) and the lyrics seem cryptic and elusive, but don’t really inspire me to investigate it much further.

What I do find interesting is how challenging, relatively speaking it was to find this. I don’t have it on my phone, which means that it is not included in the Complete Album Collection (which does have some of his soundtrack songs, like “Things Have Changed”) and it means it isn’t included on some of the various “hard to find” bootleg collections that I have. Fortunately Spotify has come to Canada recently, and it was on there (I don’t quite get Spotify yet – they only have about half of this soundtrack, for example).

Since I’m not quite sure how to link to a Spotify track through WordPress (and even if by linking to the Canadian version of Spotify the link would work elsewhere), I googled to see if someone had uploaded the soundtrack or song to YouTube. Not in this case, which is rare. There are three versions there, one from 2013, one from 2014, and a live version that isn’t dated by the uploader. I thought that was interesting, that Dylan was performing the song live recently, since it has to be one of his least-known recordings. So I went to look up its live history and I found that it’s not even listed there. Check it out:

So, that’s a poser. I’ve found errors on BobDylan.com before (and it has been acting cranky recently), but I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a song that was just straight-up not listed. I could run through other sources and find out when he debuted it live, but I’m just not that interested in the song to do that.

One of the frustrating things about this project has been the collision between the incredible amount of sheer information that exists about Dylan on the one hand, and the frequent inability to bring it all together on the other. His site lists every single time that he has played (most) of his songs, and bootlegs exist for more than 99% of that material, but, since Dylan is anti-bootleg, there is no simple way of connecting all of that. For instance, I learned from Bjorner that in 2002 Dylan played his first acoustic version of “Maggie’s Farm” and then had to work to find that bootleg. I imagine some day in the future, long after Dylan has passed, that there will be a website, maybe even BobDylan.com, where you click on a song, you get the list of every live performance, and you click on that to listen, like Spotify. When that day comes, those bloggers are going to have considerably less aggravation than I have had.

In the meantime, enjoy this live version: