PicoBlog

After a month in the US, I’m finally back home in Buenos Aires. All the travel in recent days means I haven’t had time to write as much as I would’ve liked. So this week I’m reaching into the archive.

One of the last things I did before leaving NY was to pick up a hard drive containing a few terabytes of outtakes, roughs, refs, demos, entire shows in one wav file, backups of full recording sessions, and general detritus from the cutting room floor. Hoping I’d find something for today’s installment, I began opening folders within folders within folders. It’s endless, and a bit discouraging. Granted, I haven’t spent a lot of time on this. But a first perusal yielded very little I want anyone else to hear. Ever.

But there were a few discoveries. I was pleasantly surprised to find a version of Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love. It has a date stamp of March 4, 2019—so, not terribly long ago. But I don’t recall recording it, though I do remember learning it in 2017 for an event in Hartford, CT in support of Indivisible. The evening’s theme was “Songs of Despair and Hope”.

I know. This song hasn’t exactly been languishing in obscurity since its appearance in 1997. It’s been done, a lot, and by some very high profile artists. But I’m grateful to be living in a world where a song like this still gets that kind of coverage. It’s one of the great ones, a latter-day standard.

A love song might seem an odd choice for a political event. But I can think of few songs that convey hope (along with compassion and empathy) as well or with the same immediacy as this one. Then as now, hope is a political stance—even (especially?) if it comes in the form a love song. You might be one person, or you might be a world. Like Bridge Over Troubled Water, anyone who sings Make You Feel My Love (and means it) has to inhabit the promises it makes. Keeping them is another story.

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