“Isis” by Bob Dylan

"Isis" sits second on Bob Dylan's Desire, the 1976 Columbia album, and it's a tall tale told at a gallop. Dylan wrote it with Jacques Levy in July 1975, and the pair dressed it in the dust of ancient Egypt, right down to the title, borrowed from a goddess. Dylan himself has called it a song about marriage: a narrator weds a mysterious woman named Isis, and the story spins out from there.

There's no chorus to hide behind, just verse after verse over a waltz-time piano vamp that circles the same few chords like a buzzard, with bass, drums and Scarlet Rivera's violin keening a bluesy counterpoint to Dylan's modal, folk-song melody. He signs off with a quick run up the piano keys. Don DeVito produced it, with Don Meehan engineering.

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