Tambourine Man
- Þorkell Daníel Jónsson
- Aug 28, 2015
- 2 min read
Song and Lyrics: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan wrote the song Mr. Tambourine Man in the first half of 1964. He recorded it the following year for the album Bringing it all home. The same year, the Byrds recorded their version of the song. That version went to the top of the Billboard chart and it is the only Dylan song to have done so.
The version in this article is about is based on Dylan's version but the riff from the The Byrds' version is also there if anyone wants to play it. In the original version, Dylan played running that song with a capo on the third fret, making it sound a little triad higher than the chords say. Of course, it applies here to choose the pitch that the singer can handle. I myself find it difficult to sing the song in F, so I lower it a bit and put the capo on the second fret. Dylan lowered the E bass by a whole step to a D. I think the purpose of that was to increase the possibilities of occasional bass runningthat in the accompaniment. In any case, it sounds good to play the E string when playing both the A chord and the D chord and to play sus2 or sus4 chords occastionally to decorate the D chord.
There have been speculations that the lyrics in the song are about drugs. Dylan himself has denied that. The motivation for the lyrics was simply that Dylan saw Bruce Langhorn carry a huge Turkish drum with bells attached to it into the studio. Like most of Dylan´s lyrics, the lyrics are pure brilliance and have far more depth than if it was only about some acid-tripping. This Bruce played the sub-melody that can be heard in Dylan's 1965 recording.
You can always speculate on what Dylan was thinking when he wrote the lyrics. They were written after the Mardi Gras Festival in New Orleans. The song starts with the chorus where the narrator speaks to the man with the Tamborine and asks him to sing for him to ease his mind. Immediately in the chorus, you get the feeling that the song is about loneliness.
The first verse continues to deal with loneliness and you sense emptiness and fatigue. It can be imagined that the narrator is tired in soul and body after the celebrations the day before and that in him these feelings were awakened when things got quieter. Verse two raised the idea that the text was about drugs, but I think the text of the verse simply refers to a desire to leave everything behind. A desire that many people feel when the pressure is high and they would gladly reduce it. Sometimes it's good to have someone you can trust completely and follow blindly to a better place. The Tamborine Man represents that feeling. It can also be envisaged that the tambourine man is the personification for music, and the music is the escape from worry and fatigue.
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