Music Review: 'To Make You Feel My Love' (Single by Billy Joel)

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Pros: Simple but powerful lyrics, fine performance by the Piano Man
Cons: None...this is a gem of a cover!

There is nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love.

One of the nicest surprises when I bought my Billy Joel: The Complete Hits Collection 1973-1997 Limited Edition was a trio of covers that closed the Volume III: 1985-1997 disc; I'm not much of a listener of rock or country, thus I'd never heard Hey, Girl, Light as a Breeze, or To Make You Feel My Love.

I've also never paid much attention to Bob Dylan's music; I was too young in the 1960s to have heard him when he was popular and bewildering listeners with his folk-rock anthem The Times, They Are-a Changin', and when I did hear it as a college student in the mid-1980s, I was not only bewildered by the lyrics, but I wasn't too thrilled by Dylan's nasal voice. With that in mind, when I looked at the booklet of lyrics and saw the songwriter credit under To Make You Feel My Love and saw it was by B. Dylan, I snapped the booklet shut and looked no more. Yuck, I thought, a Bob Dylan song.

Nevertheless, after having shelled out nearly $40 (in 1998) for a four-disc boxed set, I figured I'd better listen to it at least once; if I didn't like it I could always hit the SKIP TRACK button and move on to Hey, Girl or Light as the Breeze or simply hit STOP after the last Joel original song The River of Dreams.

Considering my lowered expectations for this song, it's ironic that I fell in love with this song from the first measure of the instrumental introduction (or vamp, as my high school chorus teacher taught us) to the last line of the final verse.

I must have been in a very sentimental mindset that afternoon in 1998 -- I'd already been moved to tears by Billy's And So It Goes and Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel) -- so it wasn't terribly surprising when I felt goosebumps when I heard the restrained first measure of the piano vamp. Gentle and quiet (and contrasting nicely with The River of Dreams which had preceded it), that little 10-second intro caught my attention. Then I heard this:

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love

Whoa! Those powerful lyrics hit me like a ton of bricks falling from the top of the Empire State Building and I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. I'd already been moved by And So It Goes and Lullabye, granted, but for some reason Dylan's plain-yet-powerful words and music, combined with Billy Joel's unvarnished and Dylanesque performance, had scored a direct hit upon my sentimental core.

Entranced, I listened carefully, stifling sobs and wiping tears as I took in the first chorus:

I know you haven't made your mind up yet
But I could never do you wrong
I've known it from the moment that we met
No doubt in my mind where you belong

My heart was pounding as I realized that Dylan's song expressed all the feelings I've ever had for the women I've loved in my life but never could articulate. Tears of recognition...of frustration...of pent-up loneliness flowed freely as I listened to the song.

I'm not sure how many times I replayed To Make You Feel My Love that day; certainly more than five times, I'm sure. I liked it in part because (with the booklet of lyrics as my guide) I could sing along to it fairly easy; it has no difficult high-note passages as An Innocent Man and it's a relatively slow song, which is perfect for my voice range as a singer. I also liked it because although Joel is backed by a host of musicians (Robbie Kondor and Randy Waldman on keyboards, Philip Nowlam and Bob Mann on guitars, Will Lee on bass, Sean Pelton on drums, Peter Asher and Joe Nicolo on percussion sequencing, Anton Fig on a Cakewalk snare drum, and strings and chorus backing arranged and conducted by David Campbell); the Piano Man not only impressively channels Dylan's voice but also plays the piano, a Hammond B-3 organ, and the harmonica solo that's heard at the 2:02 mark between verse three and The storms are raging on the rolling sea second chorus.

As I've grown older and been buffeted by the ups and downs (mostly downs) of star cross'd love affairs and relationships, I've become more and more attached to this song, partly because it's a really good song (so good, in fact, that Joel's friend Garth Brooks covered it in his greatest hits compilation album to great effect), but also because it does echo my own sentimental philosophy. For as flawed as I am -- self-centered, overly sentimental, and often very, very foolish -- I seriously take these words to heart and want to share them with the woman I love.

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