I hope that empathy doesn't disappear from rock music lyrics. It might be the most important function of art, if you think about it - the way that it can help us to enter imaginatively into another person's situation and emotional/psychological state. Because as life goes by, we realize that most of us will never encounter all the types of people that make up a world. There isn't the time for one thing. But with the help of literature, music, the visual arts, etc. we can go to many places and meet many people. (I always liked the title of William Blake's poem "The Mental Traveller".)

Over the last couple of posts, I've written about two great Robbie Robertson songs that require empathy to be fully appreciated. Here's another. "The Shape I'm In" from Stage Fright (1970) is one of the most powerful lyrics I've ever come across. It presents a series of rough experiences, unadorned. And it raises more questions than it answers - it's comparable to Hemingway in some regards - but once you've heard it, just try to forget it. The crux of the song comes at the end with the following line: "Save your neck/ Or save your brother/ Looks like it's/ One or the other". And it's all made more poignant by the fact that its singer, the great Richard Manuel, died by his own hand in 1986 at the age of forty-two.

Robbie Robertson's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", the third track on The Band (1969), may be his greatest song. And that's saying a lot. The song is the first-person story of a Confederate soldier who has lost family members and his livelihood, who has endured tremendous suffering and starvation, and who then must face the task of rebuilding everything, including his sense of belonging to a country that he's not sure he understands. It's a remarkable achievement, because every word (and every note) sounds genuine, as though the song were written in the 1860's, rather than a century later. It's interesting that the note of confrontational celebration in the chorus, when "all the bells were ringing" and so forth, was not one in which Lincoln indulged. When news of the formal Confederate surrender came to him, he ordered the band to play "Dixie", saying "I've always considered it one of the finest tunes I've ever heard".