Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

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"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is the last song on the Bob Dylan album Blonde on Blonde, which was released in 1966.

At 11:23 minutes long, the song has five stanzas of surreal poetic imagery all pertaining, and coming back to, the woman figure. The song is in 6/8 time yet the form of the lyrics is far from traditional; Dylan's intonation at times straying 'beyond' the melody, but never out of it.

It is written as a list song, that comes back to a chorus line at the end of each stanza. The song is filled almost entirely with poetic symbols, such as in the first line "with your mercury mouth/in the missionary times" where mercury poetically stands for "messenger". The lyric as a whole is concise yet vague.

Many critics have noted the similarity of 'Lowlands' to 'Lownds', the name of Dylan's wife Sara when he married her. Her maiden name was Shirley Noznisky, and her father, Isaac Noznisky, was a scrap metal dealer in Wilmington, Delaware. Critics have noted the link between "sheet metal memories of Cannery Row" and the business of Sara's father. Similarly the line "your magazine husband who one day just had to go" could be a reference to Sara's first husband, magazine photographer Hans Lownds.^[1] Dylan acknowledged how indebted he felt to Sara for this song; in "Sara" on the album Desire (1976) Dylan sang:

Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,

Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

For his Dylan biography, Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades, Take Two (2000), Clinton Heylin interviewed Blonde on Blonde drummer, Kenny Buttrey. Buttrey gave this account of the recording of the song: "He ran down a verse and a chorus and he just quit and said, 'We'll do a verse and then a chorus and then I'll play my harmonica thing. Then we'll do another verse and chorus and we'll play some more harmonica and see how it goes from there.'...Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dramatically for a basic two to three minute record, because records just didn't go over three minutes... If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man this is it. this is going to be the last chorus and we've got to put everything into it we can... After about ten minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?" ^[2]

Joan Baez, the leading folk singer and former lover of Dylan covered this song on her 1968 album of Dylan songs: Any Day Now. Jon Anderson also covered this song on the Yes album Friends and Relatives Vol.2. Friends and Relatives is a collection of Yes band members and their friends solo/joint ventures.

Dylan has never performed this song in concert.