Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Moral & Misanthrope. The new songs are shapely and graceful, but their simplicity is deceptive. Several of them are suffused with religious feeling-a sorrowing series of meditations on the Christian ethic, outlined in a language that is close to simplistic. One, The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, is a parable on temptation: Judas lures Jesus into a bawdyhouse, where he dies. "The moral of this story, the moral of this song,/Is simply that one should never be where one does not belong." I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, an easygoing paraphrase of Joe Hill, becomes a jeremiad...
...Pity the Poor Immigrant, chanted to a tune that is as basic as one of the late Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl ballads, is a melancholy portrait of a misanthropic, malcontented wanderer "who passionately hates his life and likewise fears his death." The album's title song, John Wesley Harding (who "was never known to make a foolish move") is an oldtime saga about a kind of Nietzschean super dream...
...musical style has kept pace with his growing control over poetic expression. His melodic style has deepened; the bluesy Dear Landlord (in which Dylan accompanies himself on a tinny barroom piano) is a subtle, intense, spacious tune. Moreover, there are times when he abandons his customary foghorn speech-song in favor of something identifiable as singing...
...This song is called Alice's Restaurant, it's, er, about Alice and the restaurant but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant; that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's Restaurant...
With this foot-shuffling introduction, Arlo Guthrie launches into 18 minutes and 20 seconds of wildly seriocomic semitrue narrative-plus-song about how he helped a friend named Alice clean out her place in Stockbridge, Mass., dumped the refuse over a cliff, was arrested for litterbugging and fined $50, and how this police record later got him into hot water at the draft board...