Bob Dylan
Desire

In this album, existential drift finds its ultimate musical expression.

When listening to it, even today, thirty years later, you relive fully the ghosts of a defeated, suffering, melancholy, wandering, and lonely soul. A leading role is played by Bob Dylan's voice, never again so magnetic, deep, and true. All of this is paced by lyrics sometimes moving, other times lashing and sharp like ice blades slowly sinking into the human soul.

And certainly, that mournful violin does not go "unnoticed," serving as the emotional through-line for all the songs, binding them indissolubly and conceptually in a single acute sense of loss and immeasurable pain. "Desire" is effectively the most radical embodiment of human depression. The feverish opening entrusted to Hurricane extends into a desperate and angry accusation. It is a harsh critique of expired American morality and its summary judgments, a series of black and white images like slaps, spits in the face, like abandoned ruins facing the sea, bittersweet anger over the sunset of all certainties and future hopes. Hurricane vehemently denounces juridical atrocities swallowed up, suffocated, and silenced for too long. In this, Dylan has never changed since the beginning of his artistic "pilgrimage": always being touched and disturbed by injustices suffered by those who don't deserve them, by the honest, the diligent and good workers, especially if they are of color.

After Hurricane, his singing becomes less harsh, and all the anger transforms into searing sadness. His words are not hopeful; they are bitter and disillusioned. Isis, a macabre ballad over which a dark omen of death looms, focuses on a completely different theme: there is no longer the fierce social critique of the unjust incarceration of the black boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, but rather the bitterness and sense of emptiness left behind by the aftermath of Dylan's separation from his beloved wife Sara. Idolized ten years earlier in the splendid and visionary ballad Sad-Eyed Lady of The Lowlands, the almost divine figure of his wife reappears repeatedly throughout the album like a sacred spirit. She appears in Isis ("...I married Isis on the fifth day of May, but I couldn't stay too long..."), in One More Cup of Coffee ("...your voice is like a meadowlark, but your heart is like an ocean dark and mysterious...”), and again in the splendid and very sad Oh Sister: "...if I come knocking at your door, don't turn away, or you will create sadness, time is an ocean but it ends at the shore, who knows if you'll see me again tomorrow...").

Finally, as an "epitaph" of the album, there is a piece titled Sara, a long shiver of melancholy spreading in the air, a macabre dance torn apart by a concealed wailing violin, all punctuated by beautiful phrases like: "...I can still hear the sound of those Methodist bells, I had done the therapy and had just come out of it, writing Sad-Eyed Lady of The Lowlands for you at the Chelsea Hotel, awake for days and days I stayed...".

Because "Desire" still sounds today this way: mournful like the off-screen song of a whimsical, tearful, sad, at times resentful story.