My Wife's Home Town

Album: Together Through Life (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • This slow blues number refers to the wife literally from hell and it concludes with a demonic cackle from Dylan. The singer-songwriter legend can also be heard laughing on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," a track on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.
  • Chicago blues has always been a huge influence on Dylan, and on this song he borrows from Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You."
  • Dylan borrowed the line "I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone," from Geoffrey Chaucer's medieval masterpiece Canterbury Tales. The quote appears in a translation of the prologue to The Monk's Tale.
  • In an interview published on Dylan's website, he was asked if he really believed the line in this song: "Dreams never did work for me anyway." Dylan replied: "Well, yeah. Dreams can lead us up a blind alley. Everybody has dreams. We go to sleep and we dream. I've always thought of them as coming out of the subconscious. I guess you can interpret them. Dreams can tell us a lot about ourselves, if we can remember them. We can see what's coming around the corner sometimes without actually going to the corner."

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