"Idiot Wind" is a song by Bob Dylan. It appeared on his album Blood on the Tracks.
The song was likely to have been written in the summer of 1974, after his comeback tour with The Band that year. Working on a suggestion from his brother, Dylan re-recorded half the songs on Blood on the Tracks, including "Idiot Wind". The re-recorded versions were radical departures from the original recordings, and "Idiot Wind" saw a tremendous change, including the adding of a full band backing from an essentially solo acoustic recording. The sessions in which he re-recorded these songs took place after the initial pressing of Blood on the Tracks, however, and the session musicians Dylan used were not given credit for their work on the album sleeves.
The re-recorded version of the song, done in Minneapolis and issued on Blood on the Tracks, is listed as 7:48 long. The original recording, done in New York and eventually released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, runs 8:52 long.
A raucous live version, listed at 10:21 long, is included as the closing track to Hard Rain.
Even though Dylan claims that the song's lyrics have no relation to the messy situation of his marriage to Sara Dylan, his son Jakob Dylan has stated about the album in interviews that "The songs are my parents talking".
The song was #16 on American Songwriter magazine's The 30 Greatest Dylan Songs.
Famous quotes containing the words idiot and/or wind:
“The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes,
The meadow creeps implacable and still;
A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies.
One two three the cows bulge on the hill.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)