"Cold Irons Bound" is a Grammy Award-winning song written by Bob Dylan, released in 1997 on his critically acclaimed album Time Out of Mind. An alternate version was released on the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack in 2003. A live version was released in Japan on the compilation Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances in 2001. Since its composition, "Cold Irons Bound" has been a regular in Dylan's live setlists.
Oliver Trager describes "Cold Irons Bound" as "biting" with "ricocheting guitar licks, rockabilly drums, distorted organ, and voice floating in a blimp of its own echo," in which "one can still hear, to paraphrase "Visions of Johanna," the ghost of electricity howling from the bones of Dylan's face..." Michael Gray also describes this song in detail:
"There's an interesting tension, too, in "Cold Irons Bound," perhaps more accurately an interesting inappropriateness between, on one side, the grinding electronic blizzard of the music and the cold, aircraft-hangar echo of the voice lamenting its sojourn across a lethal planet - fields turned brown, sky lowering with clouds of blood, winds that can tear you to shreds, mists like quicksand - and on the other side the recurrently stated pursuit of tenderness, in phrases that seem imported from another consciousness...It's decidedly odd to hear, pitched against the scraping Lanois winds half tearing us to shreds, sentiments as obdurately "romantic" as-
- I found my own, found my one in you
- or
- Lookin' at you and I'm on my bended knee
- or
- I tried to love and protect you
- and to hear such a defensively bleak, exhausted old voice articulate the thought that
- I'm gonna remember forever the joy we've shared. "
Famous quotes containing the words cold and/or bound:
“For, brother, know that this is art, and you
With a cold incautious sorrow stricken dumb,
Have your own vanishing slit of light let through,
Passionate as winter, where only a few may come:
Not idiots in the street find out the lees
In the last drink of dying Socrates.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)