Recently I wrote how Donovan’s Catch the Wind was one of the most impactful folk love ballads I had ever heard, and certainly one of the most cherished songs of my youth. Well, here comes another that I would place just as highly and that held a similarly special place in my early teenage years. I first heard Tomorrow Is a Long Time when I picked up Bob Dylan’s Masterpieces (the triple-LP greatest hits album), and it floored me from the get-go. I felt like I was listening to an English traditional romantic ode from a bygone era. Dylan’s voice projects loneliness and longing, yet it remains modest and restrained as he pines for his love. It is one of his few early songs where he reveals fragility and tenderness with such openness and humility:
I can’t see my reflection in the waters
I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain
It is here – through inward recognition and reflection – that Dylan presents himself as a young, idealistic man, washed far from shore, with “no direction home.” He stands alone with little more than faith that his “true love” – the thing he seeks and prays for- might be both a real love on whom he can finally rest his head, and a quiet appeal to the music goddess herself: a plea to be set upon a path of artistic fulfilment, to give his life meaning, and to ensure he is never again lost or untethered from his moorings.
It is also timely that just a week ago, when I presented The Smashing Pumpkins’ song Today, there was the same futile resignation that “tomorrow’s much too long” to reach. The same sense of pain runs through Tomorrow Is a Long Time, where suffering and longing in the present stretch time itself, making every passing minute feel like an eternity. Despite what seems like a hopeless state – I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps / Or can’t remember the sound of my own name – the final verse ends with quiet assurance, recognising not only the beauty of nature, but the infinite beauty found in his true love’s eyes.
The following was mostly abridged from the Wikipedia article below:
Tomorrow Is a Long Time is yet another previously unreleased masterpiece Bob wrote in his very early days which didn’t see the light of day until it was released 8 years later in 1971 on his Greatest Hits Vol II. It was subsequently included in the triple LP compilation, Masterpieces. The song is actually a live performance recorded from his Town Hall show in April 12, 1963. Dylan originally recorded the song in December 1962 as a demo for M. Witmark & Sons, his publishing company which was long available as a bootleg. It was released by Columbia in 2010 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962–1964.
Elvis Presley recorded the song on May 26, 1966, during a session for his album How Great Thou Art. The song originally appeared as a bonus track on the album Spinout. Dylan once said that Presley’s cover of the song was “the one recording I treasure the most.”
[Verse 1]
If today was not a crooked highway
If tonight was not a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all
Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
And if I could hear her heart a-softly pounding
Yes, and only if she was lying by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again….
[Verse 2]
I can’t see my reflection in the waters
I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain
I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps
Or can’t remember the sound of my own name
Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
And if I could hear her heart a-softly pounding
Yes, and only if she was lying by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again…
[Verse 3]
There’s beauty in that silver, singing river
There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes
Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
And if I could hear her heart a-softly pounding
Yes, and only if she was lying by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again…
References:
1. Tomorrow Is a Long Time – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
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