All The Tired Horses (1970) – Bob Dylan

I always enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan’s ridiculed 1970 record Self Portrait starting with today’s featured track All the Tired Horses which opens the double album. I like the beautiful interplay of voices and instruments on All the Tired Horses. It’s where simplicity and sophistication intersect and eventually collide into a spectacular array of sound….yes it repeats one lyric over and over, but each and every line has a different musical progression.

All the Tired Horses is most notable for its absence of Dylan’s singing. It consists of a small choir of female voices (Hilda Harris, Albertine Robinson, and Maeretha Stewart) repeating the same two lines to the same melody for 3 minutes and 14 seconds, with varying instrumental accompaniment. In the key of C major, this song consists musically of the chord structure C-Am-Em-G repeated throughout.

All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.

All the Tired Horses was used in the 2001 film Blow and covered by Lisa O’Neill and used in the last scene of the 2022 finale of the TV series Peaky Blinders.

In my previous entry from the album I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know Dylan said the following about the Self Portrait album (which he also called his own bootleg record):

There’d be crowds outside my house. And I said, “Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you know? They’ll go on to somebody else,”

References:
1. All the Tired Horses – Wikipedia
2. Self Portrait – Bob Dylan

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand