Never Say Goodbye (1974) – Bob Dylan

I was weighing up whether to add Never Say Goodbye to the Music Library Project, but two aspects of it which bent me towards the affirmative – ‘let her rip‘ were the following:

The first was when Dylan sings the following at 0:41 in the studio version at the end of the post:

You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me

His build up to this is immense. It is indeed, ‘beautiful beyond words‘. But it seems Dylan doesn’t know what to do after that – he’d already reached the summit in the song. Thankfully, he repeats the same build-up at 2:00 and sings:

Oh Baby, baby, baby Blue
You changed your last name too.

This is a rare case of a Dylan studio release where I think he didn’t know how to tame his own art. And that might explain why he never played Never Say Goodbye again. The pinnacle was in the mix by those two stellar examples above. And when he does close the song, it seems he was in a rush to get the hell outta there.

The second aspect was learning that Never Say Goodbye was released on the album Planet Waves on January 17, 1974, two days after my birthday.

[Verse 1]
Twilight on the frozen lake
North wind about to break
On footprints in the snow
Silence down below

[Verse 2]
You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye

[Verse 3]
Time is all I have to give
You can have it if you choose
With me you can live
Never say goodbye

Untold Dylan wrote:

Hidden somewhere at the end on Side Two of Planet Waves, a forgotten gem from Dylan’s catalogue shines. ″Never Say Goodbye″ has been mainly ignored since its release, is mentioned here and there without further emotion or qualification, casually dismissed as a filler and only a very few times appreciated. Dylan does not look back at the song either – in 1973 he records the song, then never performs it again. Which in itself is hardly conclusive, of course. We do know that Dylan is a remarkably poor judge of his own work. But the silence of the thousands of devout bobheads is quite odd.

The song is one of the first songs for Planet Waves. When the recordings start in November 1973, Dylan has made demo recordings of three songs months before (in June): in addition to ″Never Say Goodbye″ also ″Nobody ‘Cept You″ (which would eventually only appear on The Bootleg Series in 1991) and ″Forever Young″, the instant classic that will be released on Planet Waves in two different versions.

References:
1. Dylan in chaos: Never say goodbye – Untold Dylan
2. Never Say Goodbye; never go back – Untold Dylan