
This acoustic dirge is generally considered to be a kiss-off to Bob Dylan’s erstwhile friends in the ’60s folk scene; sneering renditions of it at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and in Don’t Look Back have placed it firmly in the Dylan canon of acrid accusation songs like “Positively 4th Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” But if you first heard “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” without this historical context — or if you can somehow shake the song free of it — it scans like the wincing, helpless lament of a bystander to someone else’s breakdown or self-immolation (“The carpet, too, is moving under you”). The refrain of the title contains the song’s tonal multitudes, and Dylan’s: it sounds like a taunt, a mournful disclosure and a reassurance all at once.