The Divine Poetic Genius of Gillian Welch's "I Dream A Highway"

This is more than a song, it's an energetic experience.

I’ve never had a favorite song. I’ve been performing since I was a child, and I learned to speak through song lyrics absorbed on long car rides with my mother, when she went back to college for her teaching degree and we would commute an hour and half from our house in Easton to Salisbury, Maryland. I’ve been hyper-fixated on songs, listening to them on repeat until they don’t quite hit the same anymore. I have a tier of songs that I can listen to no matter what mood I’m in.

But I’ve never had a favorite. There has never been one that hit me harder than rest.

Until recently.

A few months ago, I took a fresh listen to Gillian Welch’s 2001 masterpiece Time (The Revelator). I could go on and on about this record, but I’m going to stop myself before I get carried away because I’m here for a specific reason.

I now have a favorite song. This is big. HUGE, even!

The album ends on “I Dream A Highway,” a fourteen minute and thirty-nine second lyrical masterpiece exploring death, love, loss, and the impact of the evolving American music industry on the soul of the artist. The first time this song was ever played, it was recorded. They did two takes and edited them together for the final track. You can feel the potency of that freshness in the delivery of every single line.

She references Johnny Cash kicking out the lights at the Grand Ole Opry, Gram Parson and Emmylou Harris, the book of Ezekiel, Lazarus, and leaving Nashville. Many are familiar with the album’s penultimate track, “Everything is Free,” which explicitly laments and accurately predicts the negative impact streaming would have on musicians.

“I Dream A Highway” takes that thread and pulls it, deepening into what exactly is being lost - the sustainability of the soul in art, the narrator’s humanity, the coexistence of integrity and a living - in a rhythmic lull that stretches itself across and through a potent movement of energy for listeners who are open to receive it.

I can’t stop listening to this song. For months, I’ve listened to it every day. As I’ve been playing more covers out, I open every set with it. I’ve played it out four times in the past three days. It’s magic. It’s fourteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds of absolute and total divinity, expressed and channeled through Welch’s lyrical genius. It is an expression of grief so completely aware of itself that anyone who has encountered significant loss will feel and understand exactly what’s being captured.

It’s my favorite song.

I’ve never had one of those before.

To celebrate, I am going to use the privilege of this time and space to tell you what I hear and feel when I listen to this song, from a spiritual perspective. I am a word girl, after all.

This is meant to be a companion to actually listening to the song, just in case that wasn’t already clear!

We open with the refrain:

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and rest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Beginning from a point of separation highlighted by the longing to return to an unnamed lover, the narrator is haunted by both the long path between themselves and whoever they might be speaking to, as well as the silver ghost of that subject. At its introduction, this song seems to be about a person separate from the narrator herself.

We move from there right into the first of eleven (!!) verses:

John, he's kicking out the footlights
The Grand Ole Opry's got a brand-new band
Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand
I dream a highway back to you

Johnny Cash was famously banned for life from performing at the Grand Ole Opry, for smashing the stage lights while in the the thick of alcohol and drug abuse in 1965. This specific moment in music is a dot on a timeline. It’s the legacy of the soul struggle those who are born poets and forced to participate in capitalism frequently encounter. It is evidence of the chaos that is routinely born from the intersection of those commercial success as an artist, and what must be sacrificed in order to sustain it. It chips away at the soul, to be commercialized when you’re a poet. Poets are already familiar with demons, as we’re born to soothe them into submission with our words. This is the work of the artist, and its the bedrock of American folk music. Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand… doing the work. This builds on a line from “Everything is Free” - Or I can get a straight job. I've done it before. Never minded working hard. It's who I'm working for.

And with the connective tissue, dream of this highway back to the subject, rhythmically built over its repetition in each verse, we head into:

I think I'll move down into Memphis
And thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue
I lie and wait until the wagons come
And dream a highway back to you

Moving down into Memphis, presumably from Nashville, the narrator abandons the bright lights of what was promised, understanding our culture’s definition of success to be an illusion. The dream is burning, because the dream requires the sacrifice of integrity, honesty, and soul.

A “hatchet man” is someone on payroll who will do the dirty work, and someone with a “forked tongue” is deceptive, dishonest, and duplicitous. By the time the narrator realizes what she has become, who she’s turned into, it’s too late. By the time she’s able to recognize the devils she made deals with, she’s already fully in the machine.

All she can do is wait for someone to come along who might buy her bullshit enough to give her a ride out.

This isn’t just about the music industry. It’s a deeply human exploration of being born with a soul into this realm, in the time of late-stage capitalism. Or during the fall of the Roman Empire. Or in the Garden of Eden. She’s a poetic genius. She’s a witch.

Let’s keep going:

The getaway kicking up cinders
An empty wagon full of rattling bones
Moon in the mirror on a three-hour jones
I dream a highway back to you

The narrator begins her journey to Memphis, presumably the point of reconciliation, in a wagon for the dead as Nashville burns behind her. Under the moonlight, the yearning to be reunited grows and compounds into a physical hunger for catharsis that remains unmet.

With this next chorus,

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come arrest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Welch switches out the word “arrest” for “rest,” emphasizing the guilt she feels for who she has become within the circumstances.

Now, on an energetic level, we move a layer deeper over the next couple of verses:

Which lover are you, Jack of diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram
I'll send a letter, don't know who I am
I dream a highway back to you

Now here is where things get interesting for me, personally. Up until this point in the song, it’s totally plausible to me that she’s calling out to a lost lover through time and space. But here, opening verse 4 with the question, “Which lover are you?” jolts that narrative off course for me. She’s not speaking to a lover, if she’s asking them to clarify which one they are. In the same breath, she assigns the roles. She’s be Gram, and they’ll be Emmylou. Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, to be exact. The famously star-crossed collaborators who fell in love but could never be.

But she doesn’t know who they are. She doesn’t know who she is. She’s dreaming a highway back to who? To where?

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now, I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you

Lost in the journey of becoming and unbecoming, the dissolution of the “self,” the narrator is fading into herself and into this realm. At the same time, she cannot hide. Covered in the cold glow of a television screen, still she yearns to return, or to be returned.

I wish you knew me, Jack of diamonds
Fire-riding, wheeling when I laid 'em up
Drank whiskey with my water, sugar with my tea
My sails in rags with the staggers and the jags
I dream a highway back to you

There are a few country music references here in this verse, in addition to a lyrical callback to an earlier song on this album, but I feel something underneath that. This, in a sense, is a funeral for the narrator’s former selves. If the journey of this highway begins at the top of a metaphorical mountain, and brings us down into the valley, this verse speaks to the version of the narrator who climbed the mountain in the first place. Full of fire, her sails tattered by the fight forward, as she drunkenly blazes ahead.

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision convalesced my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Again we see the switch up: “arrest” becomes “convalesced.” She’s positing that her soul has been rehabilitated slowly, over time, in the aftermath of life thus far.

Now give me some of what you're having
I'll take you as a viper into my head
A knife into my bed, arsenic when I'm fed
And I dream a highway back to you

This verse speaks to the weapons we must armor ourselves with to navigate the social and economic constructions of mankind. In this case, the narrator highlights a viper, a knife, arsenic, and perhaps alcohol with “give me some of what you’re having.” Deadly! This life is a march to the death, moment by moment, day by day. There’s something here around numbness - is the narrator asking to go numb, or to be shocked out of a state of numbness? The open-ended question remaining unsatisfied is the feeling.

Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you

A biblical reference to the book of Genesis, which describes a flaming sword that turns every direction in order to keep Eve out of the garden once she’d taken the fruit, wrapped up in “hangover” wordplay? Astounding. What’s being woken up? I can feel the pulsing headache when she sings these words. The cold, harsh reality of where the narrator is, and that the present circumstances are the product of nothing but her own participation in life. Absolutely gutting.

Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel inside a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you

On the search for a hangover cure, time slows down in the diner as the narrator notices how fragile the people who succeed within these systems actually are. In the stark light of the morning, they tremble. Focusing in on the waitress with an allusion to the Book of Ezekiel, she highlights the way nature and life folds in on itself cyclically. Every aspect is contained in every moment, and every moment is, simultaneously, singular. And she dreams a highway back to “you.” Back to who? We’re almost there.

I always feel another descent here, a deepening down into the feeling captured and communicated by this song.

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision convalesced my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you
I dream a highway back to you

Lazarus was famously brought back to life from the capital-d Dead. There’s been a miracle. She’s still here. Until I heard this line, “don’t lie alone behind a window shade,” I had never before wondered if Lazarus struggled with survivors guilt. I know I do. Even when delivered from your own mortality, you will not be left unscathed. What a profound and intimate sense of safety. Come, let me see the mark its left on you. I dream a highway back to you. I dream a highway back to you.

I always feel like this verse is a natural opportunity for an end here. But the song doesn’t end here. It keeps going.

Life doesn’t end when the world comes crashing down around you, or when the miracle delivers your from your own self-destruction. It keeps going. What sustains you?

What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you

I thought I already learned all of this. I thought I already mastered all of this. But here I am, again, in the ash. Walk me out into the rain, won’t you? I want to be clean. Walk me out into the snow, won’t you? The heat left me burned and blistered.

Help me.

Help me return to myself.

Where has my soul gone? Or, maybe more precisely, how has my soul remained intact enough that I am able to recognize how horrific this place is, how difficult this life is, how routinely I have been pushed into compromising myself for some dream, some vision, some illusion of success or love or wonder. I made my deals with my devils, and I was burned for it, and still, here I am, able to comprehend all of that to a degree that indicates my soul remains present enough to suffer and recognize it. What a tragedy, what genius!

If I dream a highway and follow it, will my soul return to its natural residence, which, surely, can’t be this time and place?

If I thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue, and never speak again, might I return to myself more fully?

I dream a highway back to my own soul. I dream a highway back to the absence of identity as the world defines it. Back to the origin point of golden threads and lines of energy that move through me as a poet, as a musician, as a mystic, as a human.

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you
I dream a highway back to you

Oh I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you

More tomorrow,

xx Meg