There’s no time to decide whether the things to be taken will actually last. The urgency of a need to reform is further enhanced by the phrase ‘you think…’. There are things ‘you think will last’ – things of eternal value, which can be a basis for spiritual renewal. Reforming needn’t require a total rejection of her past. The woman’s death, then, (if it were to occur) would be spiritual death resulting from a failure to reform. The term ‘orphan’ perhaps implies a lack of concern for others, an orphan having been deprived of parental care.
The child is best seen as the consequences of the woman’s past life which will in some sense destroy her if she doesn’t turn her back on them. The orphan need not be a literal child, and the death need not be a literal, physical death. The imminence of the danger, and the need to ‘leave now’ is enhanced by her death being presented as having already occurred – the child is an ‘orphan’. However, from what follows in the first verse (in particular the reference to the orphan’s gun) this opening line would also seem to imply that there’s a danger of imminent death at the hands of her child. Taken literally, she is doing no more than deciding on a course of action following the departure of her lover and, presumably, the end of their relationship.
‘You must leave now, take what you need you think will last’
Along the way this outlook moves from depression, back to reality and finally to optimism.įrom the outset the woman’s state of mind is associated with death and whether her life has been of moral value: It traces the development of her mental outlook from the realisation of her situation at the beginning, to her purposeful response to it at the end. As such the song can be taken as her thoughts as she comes to terms with the change in her life and perhaps achieves some sort of spiritual renewal. Although the woman concerned is being addressed by the narrator, it makes sense to see her for most of the time as addressing herself. Essentially it’s about the mental state of someone trying to renew their life following what they see as a calamity – the breakup of a relationship. It arrives with a music video featuring subtle illustrations of an evil puppeteer, swirly-eyed people, a hypnotic man in a tie, and protesters with picket signs that read “Liberty” and “Stop.” He continues, “I knew that something was going on wrong / When you started laying down the law / I can’t move my hands / I break out in sweat.”Ĭlapton appears to be hinting at his previous claims about his experience with the AstraZeneca vaccine, as Rolling Stone points out, and the video features “an illustration of Jam for Freedom, the anti-lockdown UK street-performer group that Clapton supports, as well as imagery of a world on fire from disaster.The first thing to say is that there’s little reason to see It’s All Over Now Baby Blue as ‘about’ an event in Dylan’s life, such as his adopting a new musical style around the time it was written. any longer / It’s gone far enough,” Clapton sings in the track. His new song, “This Has Gotta Stop,” appears to be a rallying cry against vaccines and other issues, as Rolling Stone notes, at a time when the Delta variant is hitting unvaccinated people particularly hard. Eric Clapton, the British singer-songwriter and arguably second-greatest guitarist, continues to take what he perhaps sees as a bold stance against basic measures to protect people from COVID-19.