30 Days of Dylan #25: Lord Protect My Child

May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...

Lord Protect My Child (1983)

In 1983 Bob Dylan released the ‘Infidels’ album, the pre-release anticipation positively heightened by news that he’d moved away from Christian based material and sessions went down with, the then still on the rise, Mark Knopfler. Then on arrival reaction was underwhelming. The album had a handful of decent songs; ‘I And I’ was a clear stand-out and ‘Jokerman’ a decent stab at a commercial sounding opener. But weaker material appeared too and it became instantly clear that this would not be a record to re-establish Dylan as a creative force in his third recording decade. It lead to a pattern of anticipation and increasingly pronounced frustration on deliverance of each new album in the 80s; a mould only broken in 1989 when ‘Oh Mercy’, with Daniel Lanois’ fairy dust, brought something to legitimately get excited about. Then in 1991 the first of the ‘Bootleg Series’ hit the shops and with it came perhaps the most unfathomable revelation of Bob Dylan’s entire recording career. Four songs had been left off of ‘Infidels’ that, at a stroke, would have made it one of the albums of his career. Better than ‘Oh Mercy’, better than ‘Desire’, better than ‘Nashville Skyline’, it genuinely would have been acclaimed, over time, as one of the top five. The songs were ‘Foot Of Pride’, already heard in our ’30 Days’ journey covered by Lou Reed; ‘Tell Me’, one of Dylan’s lushest moments melodically and a track that just rains down like sweet honey; ‘Blind Willie McTell’, head-and-shoulders above any other Dylan Blues track with a spot-on vocal; and finally ‘Lord Protect My Child’ which, as songs on the subject of parenthood go, is even better than the celebrated ‘Forever Young. It’s in the ache of Bob’s singing, the anguish and anxiety knotted up in a beautiful, soulful song that captures the essence that those with children often struggle to explain. Here is an incredible accapella version by Maria Muldaur, filmed during the making of ‘No Direction Home’.