It took a false start of a debut album for Jakob Dylan to find his groove as a songwriter. Once he did on The Wallflowers’ knockout 1996 album Bringing Down The Horse, he flashed the ability to write in a variety of styles.
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On the album’s final song, “I Wish I Felt Nothing”, Dylan did his take on an old-fashioned country weeper. He did it to give a favorite instrumentalist a song to show off his strengths. And the end result went beyond the typical tear-in-your-beer fare.
“Nothing” Special
The Wallflowers’ 1992 self-titled debut album came and went without much of a trace, even with the notoriety of having the son of one of the most famous musicians of all time as the frontman of the band. Jakob Dylan wisely stepped back from that and concentrated on writing songs that resembled the music he loved most, rather than songs resembling trends of the day.
Little by little, The Wallflowers built up their reputation by gigging around Los Angeles. They secured the services of T Bone Burnett as producer. He helped them cultivate a sound that featured modern dynamics combined with old-school songwriting principles.
Bringing Down The Horse, released in 1996, spun off a couple of big hit singles in “One Headlight” and “6th Avenue Heartache”. People drawn to the record by those smashes found that the album boasted excellence pretty much from start to finish. “I Wish I Felt Nothing” earned pride of place as the closing track.
Jakob Dylan revealed after the fact that he mostly wrote the song so that Leo LeBlanc, a legendary session player, would get a showcase for his pedal steel guitar work. LeBlanc laid down his part before he passed away in 1995, which was more than a year before the album was released.
Examining the Lyrics of “I Wish I Felt Nothing”
“I Wish I Felt Nothing” tells the story of two wounded souls. The narrator hopes they can come together to console each other. But the girl decides to go for it on her own because she doesn’t believe in a happy ending. Because of this, all he feels is negative. You can kind of understand why he’d choose numbness.
He explains his depressing point of view in the first verse. “Say when you’re alone it’s better ‘cause nobody needs you,” Dylan moans. “When no one’s your friend it’s better ‘cause nobody leaves you.” It’s kind of like an updated version of Paul Simon’s viewpoint on “I Am A Rock”.
We find out the reason he feels this way. His girl, unable to summon up any optimism of her own, has decided to preemptively strike and leave him behind. “So you turned your back on a world that you could never have,” Dylan sings.
He sympathizes with her plight. “It’s just no use when all the abuse follows you ‘round,” he sings. But that ultimately leaves him feeling the same kind of pain: “Sayin’ it’s no mystery I know that nobody here needs me.” Try as he might, he just can’t leave behind the sensory world that’s torturing him. “But I hear voices,” he explains. “And I see colors.”
“But I wish I felt nothing,” he confesses. “Then it might be easy for me like it is for you.” He can no longer rise above it and wish her well, instead letting the honesty of the moment overwhelm him. “I Wish I Felt Nothing” may have been intended to cast an instrumental spotlight on LeBlanc. But it also showed off how sharp Jakob Dylan’s songwriting was as well.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Crossroads Guitar Festival
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