ABSTRACT
The chapter closely examines Bob Dylan's “I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” (Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020) in order to better understand how it creates its melancholic, sentimental, melodramatic structure of feeling. The significance of this structure of feeling within Dylan's late career and the way this structure animates a dialogue with more expansive elements of American culture are also examined. The chapter begins by investigating the three strata of the track's musical texture: the lead vocal, an anchoring ensemble, and an obbligato passage (which resembles the barcarolle from Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann). Next the chapter examines the track's unique structure and use of defining recording elements (especially the construction of its sound stage). The chapter then pays close attention to the lyric's literary form, in particular the use of apostrophe. These features of the track—musical texture and structure, recording elements, and literary form—coalesce to create the track's particular structure of feeling, what we call hard-boiled melancholy. The final portion of the chapter links the track's hard-boiled melancholy to hard-boiled detective novels and films, which have been a touchstone for Dylan's late style.
