Meditations on Bob Dylan’s “Tryin' to Get to Heaven”

“I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down”
— Bob Dylan, Tryin' to Get to Heaven

In addition to blogging about my own songwriting, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write about other songwriter's songs.  This is not done from the perspective of researching the song's background in depth, but rather from my own experience and analysis of it.  In fact, beyond consulting the lyrics, I've actually avoided other perspectives (including the author's) because that seems to be how we all most naturally experience a song.  For the first of these posts, I've chosen Dylan's "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" given that is one that I've covered and therefore have some intimate familiarity with.
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“Time Out of Mind” was the first release of new Dylan music I had at my disposal after I had become an aficionado of his music in college.  Prior to that there had been releases of old blues and folk covers on “World Gone Wrong” — but this was the first set of new originals released from the man who’d I’d come to admire for albums such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blood on the Tracks” just a few years prior.

Was I immediately in love with this new work?  No… but with opening tracks like “Love Sick” (it took me forever to even understand what he was saying with some lines) and “Dirt Road Blues” (not exactly top tier, not exactly leading with your strongest song) as well as just the overall newness of it, I think I can be forgiven.  I did immediately dig the title of the album — though this owes largely to a soft spot I have for Mercutio (having played the part, albeit only for high school class rendition).  The album subsequently became a very important album to me, one that gave me solace in those lonely moments of heartbreak.  I recall taking many a warm bath with this album playing in the background.

Admittedly “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” was not as interesting to me as “Standing in the Doorway,” “Million Miles,” and “‘Til I Fell in Love with You.”  In part I just wasn’t that taken with the vocal performance.  Moreover, there was the fact, for me as someone who is more or less an atheist (in the moments when I’m worrying about such things), even a light touch on a vaguely theological subject matter was a bit off putting (this has led to Dylan’s evangelical period still being somewhat terra incognita to me — even “Ring Them Bells” on “Oh, Mercy” is one I’m not all that inspired to revisit).

It wasn’t until I came across the early 2000’s live recording that was released as part of single with its jazzy re-harmonization that I really began digging this particular song.  Having spent most of that decade immersing myself in old Blue Note recordings and the like from the Virgin Mega Store bargain bin (a bygone era, alas) instead of listening to anything current, this was my jam.

So when this past May I put together a Bob Dylan tribute show with Swamp Child's Robb Hagle, this became one of my go to options for a song cover.  Part of it was simply that with this particular arrangement it seemed “on brand” for me given my own blending of folk, jazz and popular music.  But it’s also a song that’s come to mean more to me as I’ve taken my own songwriting more seriously.  No longer just a hobby that I keep to myself, my efforts to get my music out there in the world at a somewhat later stage of life than is typical has given the refrain and the themes of this piece greater resonance.

And as a songwriter, I find it interesting just from the standpoint of the lyrics.

There’s almost a certain sloppiness to the composition.  The first two verses start their penultimate line with “I’ve been walking” and then the song drops it for the subsequent three.  That this is an echo of the album's opening line is probably coincidental, given how these things ultimately come together, but one does wonder how much the writer is paying attention as to whether he's repeating himself (though hardly as conspicuous as the use of the word "brain" throughout Modern Times).  The line length changes so much for this line in each verse, it defies your expectations as a singer and some oddities just make remembering the order a bit difficult.  There are some helpful mnemonics, even if they are counterintuitive — the verse that’s talking about railways ends with our protagonist “going down the road feeling bad” — for instance.

There are some bits that I do just adore — this character, Miss Mary Jane, a player who appears on stage and is quickly shuffled off, is a typical Dylan walk on.  Like Mary Lou and Prince Phillip in “Dignity” she’s only there so briefly and all we see is a snapshot.  All we learn about her is she has some connection to his train of thought that begins with New Orleans and that she has a House in Baltimore.  Sure, her name is a euphemism for marijuana, but I can’t see how this makes any literal sense.  Dylan was smoking some pot in a buggy in New Orleans?  How does the house in Baltimore jive with such a reading.  To me, this is an actual person who’s memory our protagonist has tripped over in his thinking?  Perhaps she is drug-like in some way, but I prefer to interpret her as being an actual character and not just a symbol.

What's her significance then?  Her juxtaposition with the admission that he doesn’t “know what ‘all right’ even means” and within the overall song suggests that this is not a relationship that is in a good state of repair.  What happened in that house in Baltimore?  We’re not given a clue, beyond perhaps that this is a door that now is closed.  Maybe she is the lost love to whom references are interspersed throughout the lyrics — a woman he’s slowly starting to forget, a woman who’s sealed up the book.

We’re given some interesting settings for this song — thrown in “in media res” with Dylan wading through the high water just before a storm on a muggy summer day.  And then in subsequent verses we traipse through Missouri, a train platform, New Orleans and then finally his parlor, where he imagines he'll dream about ramblers of old, hitching rides on trains (the latter harkening back to the heavily self-embellished mythology of Dylan’s youth).

With the advent of “Tell Tale Signs” we know that Dylan’s approach to songwriting is more like that of a collage. Verses from the unreleased “Marching to the City” and the like wound up in completely different songs that actually ended up on this or subsequent albums.  As a writer, he’s a packrat — keeping whole verses tucked away in his outtakes in case he can reuse them later.  More recent songs are practically written like ransom notes with virtually every line clipped from different tunes from another age.   So whether any of “Try’n to Get to Heaven” is meant to make any narrative sense is questionable.  It’s imagery, it’s impressions, thematically connected…maybe.  Or maybe he just thought it sounded “right.”    

What really binds the verses together is the constant return to a loss that is haunting our protagonist — maybe not like it used to, but still there in the back, if not the forefront, of his mind.  So in what sense is he trying to get to heaven?  Who is closing the door?

One of the questions we as songwriters are often asked within the context of writing our songs (say in a song circle or writing group) is “who is being addressed here?”  Well, clearly there’s a second person — the “you” that the narrator keeps engaging with.  It sounds like it would be a woman, as I alluded to earlier.   But then there’s this strange tell in the fourth verse — “I’ve been all-around the world, boys”  — that is interesting.  Who are these “boys?”

English is a bit frustrating in its refusal to distinguish between singular and plural second person and can lead to international or unintentional authorial subterfuge, so maybe our narrator isn’t simply changing up who he’s addressing midway through the song.  Maybe he’s been addressing a group from the beginning.   Could it be this is a traveling musician, on the road, who got run out of Missouri after his gig there?  Is he speaking to his audience, perhaps in absentia, as he reflects on this tour gone wrong.  Maybe this is how we ended up wading through the water in the beginning — in his hurry to get away, there was no time to make his way to a bridge, and he ended up fording a river.

Still, whoever our boys are (fellow travelers?), this anonymous “they” hangs out there.   But they often do.  “They” are often responsible for saying things, being the ones who “ought” to do things and a myriad of sins.  Notably it’s a door, not (pearly) gates.  But still, maybe it’s the angels and archangels and saints who are about to make their domain forevermore inaccessible.  Why?  Well, maybe heaven itself is not immune from overpopulation.   For the Talking Heads, it’s a bar.  So perhaps management is concerned about violating fire codes and it’s not salvation that our protagonist is seeking, but just being part of the hip and happening scene.

Not likely.   

This is a man who feels like his opportunities are fading as he drifts and reminisces as the walking wounded.

In that I can relate, as I’m sure we all can from time to time.

​Below is my own cover of the song as well as the full lyrics.

Try’n to Get to Heaven 
Bob Dylan

The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door


When I was in Missouri
They would not let me be
I had to leave there in a hurry
I only saw what they let me see
You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door


People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin’
Like pendulums swinging on chains
When you think that you've lost everything,
You find out you can always lose a little more.
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door


I’m going down the river
Down to New Orleans
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don’t know what “all right” even means
I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane
Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore
I been all around the world, boys
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door


Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
Some trains don't pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers like they did before
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door