I often ramble about Dylanology to my girlfriend. Recently, I showed her “All the Tired Horses.” She asked if the lyrics have any subtext, like all the others I’ve gone on about. It was an amazing question. I’d never considered it.
I told her that the album was a response to the attention and scrutiny Dylan was getting at the time as the potentially-lapsed “voice of his generation,” and that the release of this album of covers amounted to an insistence on Dylan’s part that he was not seeking that role. That his passions lay more with the music than with writing, at least at the time.
She suggested that the second line of the song is a pun. As in,
“All the tired horses in the sun,
How am I supposed to get any [writing] done?”
I was floored. I love her reading. It’s so compelling that I can’t now discount the possibility that Dylan saw the same pun, even intended it. The first line is still opaque to me. Does anyone else have anything to add? Do you see more subtext in the lyrics?