94. “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love)” (from Empire Burlesque, 1985)
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Time magazine had the idea to celebrate Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday a few years back by doing a bunch of Dylan-related lists on their website. One of those was the ten worst Dylan songs.1 (That seems like a rather cruel way of sending birthday wishes, but, as they say, it’s the thought that counts.)
Listed along some of the usual punching bags like “They Killed Him,” “Wiggle Wiggle,” and “All the Tired Horses” was “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love”). (They also had “Forever Young” in there. Jeepers, hate kids much, Time magazine?)
If Time were judging the song on its video, a hilariously bad clip where Bob gets caught up in a love triangle and international espionage even as he busts out some dance moves with his backup singers, that harsh ranking might be understandable. It’s awful in the fantastic way that Masked and Anonymous is awful, so Dylan fans likely have a soft spot in their hearts for it anyway.
Most likely, it’s that old ’80s bias rearing its ugly head. There is a stigma attached to the music of that decade, a long-standing critical view that the whole MTV-influenced output of that era was trivial at best, embarrassing at worst. That’s hogwash, of course, but there is no doubting that “Tight Connection to My Heart” has the glossy production associated with the ’80s, so bright and watery that you can practically see the song when you listen. That alone is a damning characteristic that some people can’t overlook.
There is also the old Dylan-sucked-in-the-’80s critique that colors the song as well. That’s also a misguided notion that doesn’t quite hold up to close scrutiny. While it’s true that Bob floundered a bit coming out of his religious period while trying to find a sound that suited him, his songwriting was as interesting as ever. There were a couple albums that had filler (although Empire Burlesque was a consistent affair), and there were many cases when he left out songs that he should have kept in when choosing the material for his records. Yet many songwriters would give anything to have in their repertoire one quarter of the killer songs that Dylan wrote in the ’80s.
It’s a shame that ’80s bashers would dismiss this song, falling for the false notion that something that’s a lot of fun to listen to is somehow unworthy of critical respect. You can actually follow “Tight Connection to My Heart” down some lyrical alleys as labyrinthine as any Dylan has conjured. What’s more, you’ll be unconsciously bobbing your head to its subtle groove the whole time.
Dylan first took a crack at the song in the sessions for Infidels, when it was known as “Someone’s Got a Hold on My Heart.” That early version can be found on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1–3, containing some of the same lyrics and a similar groove. Yet Dylan’s vocal on that previous take was a bit blah, something that can’t be said of the eventual take of the song that made it to Empire Burlesque.
Bob soulfulness, a vastly underrated part of his vocal prowess, shines through in his performance. Let’s face it, for all of the lyrical dexterity on display in the verses, this song ultimately comes down to the simplicity of the “Has anybody seen my love?” chorus, with Bob coming up with a great neo-Motown hook as the backup singers coo and purr all around him.
That chorus helps to simplify one of those great, twisting Dylan narratives in which you’re never sure whether the “you” he’s addressing is the same from verse-to-verse or, more critically, if the “you” is the love he’s so frantically seeking. He adds some neat little tough-guy lines to further obfuscate the situation, but the feeling of longing that pervades his noirish journey is never far from the surface.
He wraps things up with an all-time great couplet (“I never did learn to drink that blood and call it wine / I never did learn to hold you, love and call you mine”) before wringing every last bit of anguish from the extended refrain. Dismiss this song at your own peril, ’80s skeptics. There’s a lot of treasure available for lyric divers, and everyone else can just groove along to the master giving one of the most heartfelt performances of his career.
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