Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (11:20)

“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is the last song on the Bob Dylan album Blonde on Blonde, which was released in 1966.

It is written as a list song that comes back to a chorus line at the end of each stanza. The song is filled almost entirely with poetic symbols, such as in the first line “with your mercury mouth / in the missionary times”.

For his Dylan biography, Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades, Take Two (2000), Clinton Heylin interviewed Blonde on Blonde drummer, Kenny Buttrey. Buttrey gave this account of the recording of the song: “He ran down a verse and a chorus and he just quit and said, ‘We’ll do a verse and then a chorus and then I’ll play my harmonica thing. Then we’ll do another verse and chorus and we’ll play some more harmonica and see how it goes from there.’…Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dramatically for a basic two to three minute record, because records just didn’t go over three minutes… If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ‘cause we thought, man this is it. This is going to be the last chorus and we’ve got to put everything into it we can… After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”