Oh Mercy - Songs

Songs

The album opens with "Political World", a song that has been described as a "catalog of troubles...almost an update on 'With God On Our Side.'" A cranky tirade against the modern world, it begins with the verse, "We live in a political world/Love don't have any place/We live in a time where men commit crime/And crime don't have a face", to which critic Thomas Ward asked, "Which age does this not apply to?"

In regard to "Everything Is Broken", Dylan wrote, "Danny didn't have to swamp it up too much, it was already swamped up pretty good when it came to him. Critics usually didn't like a song like this coming out of me because it didn't seem to be autobiographical. Maybe not, but the stuff I write does come from an autobiographical place." A propulsive, riff-driven number, it was the first single issued from Oh Mercy.

"Ring Them Bells" is one of the more celebrated tracks on Oh Mercy, and also where Lanois' production is at its most subtle and restrained. The song features some spiritual overtones, invoking St. Peter, St. Catherine and a "Sweet Martha" who may or may not be the biblical Martha. It opens with the verse, "Ring them bells ye heathen/From the city that dreams/Ring them bells from the sanctuaries/Cross the valleys and streams."

"Ring Them Bells" was also one of two songs that was released with its live vocals intact. The other song was "Man in the Long Black Coat", sequenced right after "Ring Them Bells".

"One of my favorites is 'Man in the Long Black Coat,' which was written in the studio, and recorded in one take", recalls Lanois. Praised by Heylin as a "powerful reinterpretation of The Daemon Lover motif", "Man in the Long Black Coat" also contains some prominent use of apocalyptic imagery, evoking a place where the "water is high" and "tree trunks uprooted". In his own assessment of "Man in the Long Black Coat", Dylan wrote that "in some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my 'I Walk the Line,' a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master".

The second half of Oh Mercy is notable for its sustained moodiness and resignation, often in relation to romantic dissolution. This is immediately apparent on the atmospheric "Most of the Time", which features the richest production on the album. Described as "magisterial" by Allan Jones of Melody Maker, the narrator in "Most of the Time" sings of an estranged lover whom the narrator can't quite shake from his memories. The song addresses an irreconcilable, personal relationship, and this theme would continue through "What Good Am I?", a frank look at the narrator's moral worth, and "What Was It You Wanted".

Though he is still uncertain of its origins, in his autobiography Dylan does write that "Disease of Conceit" may have been inspired by the defrocking of Jimmy Swaggart.

The album closes with "Shooting Star", a wistful ballad of remembrance with possible allusions to the loss of Dylan's Christian faith. Dylan appears to address Christ: "Seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of me/If I was still the same/If I ever became what you wanted me to be". The next line, "Did I ever miss the mark or overstep the line that only you could see" makes an apparent reference to Joseph Addison Alexander's poem "There is a line by us unseen/That crosses every path/The hidden boundary between/God's patience and His wrath.". The words occasionally evoke some portentous imagery ("the last fire truck from hell goes rollin' by"), but it ends the album on a soft, romantic note.