It's as if you were talking to yourself.'" Dylan and Columbia already seemed to have thought of the song as having commercial potential: On the LP, it was given prominent placing as the leadoff track on the second side, and in July it was released as a single on the B-side of "Blowin' in the Wind." That single probably was issued to gain some attention for the original version of a Dylan song that was already heading up the charts in a cover by Peter, Paul and Mary, for whom "Blowin' in the Wind" crested just below the top of the charts in August. It's a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. "'A lot of people," he says, "make it sort of a love song - slow and easy-going. "Dylan treats 'Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' differently from most city singers," Hentoff wrote. When The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - with Dylan and Rotolo pictured together on the cover - was released on May 27, 1963, Nat Hentoff's liner notes suggested that the song had already become a favorite of other performers. In January 1963, Broadside magazine published the song under the title "It's All Right" with some minor lyric variations from the familiar version. Dylan recorded "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" for Columbia Records on November 14, 1962, in sessions for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. He is assisted by the jaunty tune, which "rocks between minor and major thirds over the vivacious beat, balancing its dominant by a subdominant modulation, and effecting release by a chromatic twist in the return to the tonic," as Wilfred Mellers notes in A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). The lyrics reveal a conflicted narrator who actually wants to stay and is, in a sense, being dismissed, but who masks his pain with irony. In the first verse, he tells her she is the reason he's leaving in the second he wishes she would say or do something to make him stay in the third he claims she wanted too much from him and by the final verse he has become overtly sarcastic. The protagonist is telling a woman that he is leaving her, and he engages in a series of contradictory, somewhat flippant criticisms typified by the song title. Though Dylan claims composing credit, the tune is taken from on an old song called "Who's Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I'm Gone," which previously had been borrowed by folksinger Paul Clayton for his song "Who's Gonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw." Over this tune, Dylan wrote a lyric reflecting on his separation from his girlfriend of the time, Suze Rotolo, who was away in Italy. It was written by the 21-year-old singer/songwriter in October 1962. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" is among the most successful of Bob Dylan's early songs.
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