"Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight" is underrated...

“Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” is one of the most underrated songs of Bob Dylan’s eighties career. As a song on the album “Infidels”, it often gets ignored in favour of the song in which Bob Dylan criticises the moon landing - “License to Kill”. Or even the song in which Bob Dylan talks about how all of his stuff is from different countries all over the world - “Union Sundown”. It gets ignored in favour of Bob Dylan basically talking to himself in “Jokerman” and how you should not trust everyone who means well in “Man of Peace”. The songs of Infidels ignore this strange love song which is not actually a love song at all. It is a criticism of love and a criticism of the different things that people can love apart from each other. When confronted with this fault, we are bound to fall apart and yet, we cannot change this.

When being confronted with this, the ‘girl’ character is attempting to leave in order to achieve something - probably in keeping her own faults to herself. She is trying to leave before others realise that she is falling apart:

“Just a minute before you leave, girl,

Just a minute before you touch the door.

What is it that you're trying to achieve, girl?”

But the narrator states that there is no shame in falling apart for the fact that we all do it. But he makes the argument instead that the streets at nighttime are filled with people looking to do bad in the shade of the black sky. Bob Dylan actually claims that even at night in the Vatican, there is no guarantee of safety so what chance would this girl have in this strange place? Exactly, none.

“Do you think we can talk about it some more?

You know, the streets are filled with vipers

Who've lost all ray of hope,

You know, it ain't even safe no more

In the palace of the Pope.”

In order to make her comfortable and let her know that everyone has this problem, he gives her his chair and tries to make her more comfortable with not being able to go anywhere both physically and psychologically:

“Come over here from over there, girl,

Sit down here. You can have my chair.

I can't see us going anywhere, girl.”

The narrator then turns the conversation on to himself and tries to make it his own fault that she is falling apart even though the chorus suggests that he is trying to make her stop doing this, he only attempts to do this by taking the matter into his own hands. The narrator states that there were so many other possibilities to him but takes the entire thing on to his own shoulders in the fact that he has tried to sweep this problem away:

“The only place open is a thousand miles away and I can't take you there.

I wish I'd have been a doctor,

Maybe I'd have saved some life that had been lost,

Maybe I'd have done some good in the world

'Stead of burning every bridge I crossed.”

Be that as it may, the narrator still wants to protect the woman from this danger of the open world. He may not be good at talking and promising things, but he is good at just acting upon his impulses, which actually might be what got him here in this particular time:

“I ain't too good at conversation, girl,

So you might not know exactly how I feel,

But if I could, I'd bring you to the mountaintop, girl,

And build you a house made out of stainless steel.”

I really love these particular lines in which he states that even though he wants to do something but he cannot because he seems stuck in one place. He wants to move along both psychologically and physically but there is absolutely no way he can do that unless he talks to the girl. But, yet another problem is that, according to the line before, he cannot talk about these issues because he is not good at conversation at all:

“But it's like I'm stuck inside a painting

That's hanging in the Louvre,

My throat start to tickle and my nose itches

But I know that I can't move.”

So you get the general gist of this song at the moment and why it should be more analysed and accepted than it actually is. It is one of the more psychological songs on the album but I feel that because it is a love song and that the people who normally listen to Dylan are men that this song is not really accepted amongst the community and passed off as a filler song. It is not, it is a brilliantly deep song and the Dylan fans who do not get it just have not listened to it. They have not really listened to it.