My Wife's Home Town

Album: Together Through Life (2009)
Play Video

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."

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Glen Ballard

Glen BallardSongwriter Interviews

Glen Ballard talks about co-writing and producing Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album, and his work with Dave Matthews, Aerosmith and Annie Lennox.

Paul Williams

Paul WilliamsSongwriter Interviews

He's a singer and an actor, but as a songwriter Paul helped make Kermit a cultured frog, turned a bank commercial into a huge hit and made love both "exciting and new" and "soft as an easy chair."

Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World

Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat WorldSongwriter Interviews

Jim talks about the impact of "The Middle" and uses a tree metaphor to describe his songwriting philosophy.

Kiss

KissFact or Fiction

Kiss is the subject of many outlandish rumors - some of which happen to be true. See if you can spot the fakes.

Commercials

CommercialsFact or Fiction

Was "Ring Of Fire" really used to sell hemorrhoid cream?

Facebook, Bromance and Email - The First Songs To Use New Words

Facebook, Bromance and Email - The First Songs To Use New WordsSong Writing

Where words like "email," "thirsty," "Twitter" and "gangsta" first showed up in songs, and which songs popularized them.