Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart (1983) – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s 1983 resurgence album Infidels includes some fantastic outtakes like Blind Willie McTell, Foot of Pride and today’s featured song Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart. It boggles the mind how he could leave these gems off the record. I find listening to ‘Someone..’ a pure delight that enriches my senses and always leaves me with a spring in my step. It holds an intimate, raw charm which I can’t get enough of. If I devised a list of what I considered Bob Dylan’s most overlooked or underrated songs, then Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart would assuredly be in my top 10. The lyrics here are spectacular conveying a palpable tension between desire and detachment, as if he’s caught in a whirlwind of emotional uncertainty. The images he evokes just in these 4 lines are something else:

I can hear that hot-blooded singer
On the bandstand croon
Poisoned Love, Red Roses for a Blue Lady and Memphis in June
While they’re beating the devil out of a guy who’s wearing a powder blue wig

This outtake was rebooted for Dylan’s subsequent album Empire Burlesque titled Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) which I regard as the inferior version. Dylan used the basic track from one of the “Someone…” takes from 1983, and added vocal overdubs in January 1985, including vocals by female backup singers. Also in the Burlesque version he replaced blazingly original lines from Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart with excerpts from Humphrey Bogart movie scripts which biographer Clinton Heylin complained of: “reliance on the dialogue of Hollywood scriptwriters for any lyrical gaps“. Also Jonathan Lethem, contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, was disappointed that the rewrite “replaces the original’s vulnerable tone with a Bogartishly hardboiled one“.

Infidels was produced by Mark Knopfler and Dylan himself and is seen as his return to secular music, following a conversion to Christianity and a subsequent return to a less religious lifestyle. Knopfler played guitar on the Infidels’ album including Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart as he did on Dylan’s Slow Train Coming in 1979. Knopfler’s playing was paired with that of Mick Taylor, a former lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. Dylan initially wanted to produce the album himself, but feeling that technology had passed him by, he approached a number of contemporary artists who were more at home in a modern recording studio. David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello were all approached before Dylan hired Knopfler.

[Verse 1]
They say, “Eat, drink and be merry
Take the bull by the horns”
I keep seeing visions of you, a lily among thorns
Everything looks a little far away to me

[Verse 2]
Getting harder and harder to recognize the trap
Too much information about nothing
Too much educated rap
It’s just like you told me, just like you said it would be

[Verse 3]
The moon rising like wildfire
I feel the breath of a storm
Something I got to do tonight
You go inside and stay warm

[Chorus]
Someone’s got a hold of my heart
Someone’s got a hold of my heart
Someone’s got a hold of my heart
You
Yeah, you got a hold of my heart

[Verse 4]
Just got back from a city of flaming red skies
Everybody thinks with their stomach
There’s plenty of spies
Every street is crooked, they just wind around till they disappear

[Verse 5]
Madame Butterfly, she lulled me to sleep
Like an ancient river
So wide and deep
She said, “Be easy, baby, ain’t nothin’ worth stealing in here”

[Verse 6]
You’re the one I’ve been waiting for
You’re the one I desire
But you must first realize
I’m not another man for hire

[Chorus]

[Verse 7]
I can hear that hot-blooded singer
On the bandstand croon
Poisoned Love, Red Roses for a Blue Lady and Memphis in June
While they’re beating the devil out of a guy who’s wearing a powder blue wig

[Verse 8]
I been to Babylon
I gotta confess
I could still hear the voice crying in the wilderness
What looks large from a distance, close up is never that big
Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine
Never could learn to look at your face and call it mine

[Chorus]

References:
1. Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) – Wikipedia
2. Infidels – WIkipedia