“Duquesne Whistle” by Bob Dylan

"Duquesne Whistle" rolls out of the station first on Tempest, Bob Dylan's 2012 album, and Columbia put it out as a digital single on August 27, 2012, with a video two days behind it. Dylan wrote it with Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead's lyricist, and produced it himself under Jack Frost, the alias he has used on much of his 21st-century work, with Scott Litt and Dana Nielsen recording and mixing.

It's a chugging number, and critics heard a locomotive in the music, a fit for words that wind train imagery and the call of a whistle around a fond memory of a woman. Record Store Day got a limited seven-inch stereo single that November, and the song later landed on the 2014 reissue of The Essential Bob Dylan.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.