When Desire was released in 1976, Bob Dylan made one of his quietest and most radical changes. After the sentimental diary of Blood on the Tracks, he chooses to get out of yourselfto dissolve the ego to leave space for stories that seem to come from elsewhere: judicial news, myth, legend. Desire it is rather an unprecedented space in which Dylan experiments with a new idea of truth, based not on personal life but on power of the story.
The most obvious case is Hurricanealbum opener. The song reconstructs the story of the boxer Rubin Carter, unjustly imprisoned, but does so without giving in to rhetoric. Dylan organizes the facts like a film: characters, environments, twists, strategic repetitions. The result is not a simple complaint, but an implicit reflection on how justice and guilt are often the product of a distorted narrative. In Hurricane the music is pressing, forcing the listener to follow the story to the end, without emotional hooks.
On the opposite side is ISIS. Here Dylan he abandons the news and immerses himself in the territory of myth. The journey of the protagonist, who leaves, loses, symbolically descends into the kingdom of the dead and returns transformed, recalls archaic, almost initiatory structures. Isis talks about love, but only in appearance.
The album ends ideally with Saraa song that takes us back to a more intimate dimension, It is not a direct confession, but rather a memory stagedin which the feeling passes through images and fragments, as if even love could only be told indirectly.
Musically speaking, Desire it is the album in which Il violino introduces a constant tensiona feeling of instability that perfectly reflects the idea of a narrated and never definitively graspable world.
