Hard Rain

I want to memorize the lyrics to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall so I can play the song without looking them up on the computer. It's such a fun song to play, I promise. I just came across a cover of it by Jason Mraz (track 10 here), and though he plays well overall I don't like it. He does things like throw in "you bet it's a hard rain" or "I met a man who was wounded in love 'til I met another man who was wounded in hatred", showing that he doesn't have the proper respect for the lyrics - he just adds in words as filler that either add nothing to the meaning or changes it in a dumb way (what does it mean to meet someone until you meet someone else?). He also changes the guitar and makes slight changes in vocal rhythm, and the guitar is nice and more pretty-sounding, but one of my favorite things about playing the song is the relentless 3/4 rhythm of it - the strumming goes 1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3& (you get the idea) and that rhythmic effect is one of the two main aspects of the song that gives it its hypnotic effect. The other is the held-back quality of the lyrics - there seems to be a lot behind each line but we're not given enough to easily figure out what they mean. A series of cryptic, non-rhyming lines is usually a recipe for bad lyrics, but this song is saved by two things - its form, which gives it some degree of structure and coherence, and the lines themselves, which are both poetic and all fit together in a certain mood if nothing else.
I recently read an essay by Phillip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass, about the writing of Richard Dawkins, in which he observes that a crucial feature of good writing is to maintain a sense of the bigger picture in the readers. Part of the reason Lord of the Rings is so successful, according to Pullman, is that we know that everything that happens works towards a bigger, simple goal - Frodo has the drop the Ring of Power into Mount Doom and destroy it. Pullman thinks Dawkins is good at providing a big picture view like this in his scientific writing. (It's also a big part of Nietzsche's appeal - his claim to thoughts that 'span millenia' and make you feel as if you understand the basic direction of the Western tradition since the Ancient Greeks.) I think the Dylan song here is held together by a bigger picture as well, though it's kind of hard to articulate. We're listening to a dialogue and can sense the situation - a young traveler has just returned and is being asked about his journey by someone older who seems to know, love and understand him: calling the traveler "my darling young one" repeatedly and asking a follow up question after each answer, in increasing urgency - oh, where have you been? what did you see? what did you hear? who did you meet? And the son answers each time in such a way that his listener understands him but we only get a sense of what the listener is hearing. The son predicts some momentous happening beyond our comprehension, some disaster, some hard time, which leads the listener to ask the hardest question of all - what'll you do now, with your knowledge? And without a glitch in the rhythm, this elicits the final verse, which is pretty much heroic. And it's the last line before the refrain that gets me as I'm trying to play it, knowing that I don't know the lyrics or understand them but I'm warbling it anyway - "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." That's why I'd like to memorize the song, repeat it, and take the time to try to understand it, all just so I can really play it. That's also why I don't like it when someone musically talented like Jason Mraz plays it and is just singing words and making everything sound soft and emotional and pretty. He gets this last line slightly wrong and then repeats it (for emphasis of its significance, which he doesn't understand), saying "I'll know my songs well before I start singing," as if Dylan is just talking about making sure he's rehearsed his set list enough.
I guess the important thing that holds together the son's report on his journeys is that it seems like he was changed by everything he saw. A lot of it is charged with disillusionment and compassion, noticing the injustices, the outcasts, the unfairness of life among ignorance of it - obviously with "I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'; I heard the song of a poet who died in a gutter; I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley". But it seems like an honest and not all that happy look at life in its human complexities, one that necessitates the conclusion that we're up to a hard time and a challenge, which is what makes the last verse as inspiring as it is: he'll go straight to the heart of it, the worst of it, in order to reflect it to all of us and bring it out, and I think that's what he means by the song he has to know well, which why I think it misunderstands him to carelessly pluralize it.
Let us know if you have any thoughts on the song, the lyrics, the cover, any specific literary references you think he may be making, the state of the world, or whatever. I guess it's just worth mentioning at the end here though that the question and answer format of the song is based on an old ballad called Lord Randall, published by Francis James Child, and in that song the son character is telling his mother about being poisoned.

UPDATE: video clips from Christmas Day (they're cut off pretty suddenly).