Bob Dylan / 5:11
Musicians: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar (?); Mark Knopfler: guitar; Mick Taylor: guitar; Alan Clark: keyboards; Robbie Shakespeare: bass; Sly Dunbar: drums / Recording Studio: The Power Station / Studio A, New York: April 27, 1983 / Producers: Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler / Sound Engineer: Neil Dorfsman
“I and I” makes little sense unless one turns to the Rastafarian religious movement. For Rastafarians, especially Dylan’s icon Bob Marley, the expression “I and I” means that God lives in every human. In 1991, Dylan told Paul Zollo, “[‘I and I’] was one of them Caribbean songs. One year a bunch of songs just came to me hanging around down in the islands, and that was one of them.” Without a doubt, this is one of the sources of inspiration that led Dylan to use this important Rastafarian concept.
The song also contains an explicit allusion to the book of Exodus, in which the Hebrew people cross the Sinai desert to reach the Promised Land. What does the songwriter want to tell us? That the life of man is a long quest for God? It is also possible that the narrator of the song is dreaming while awake or is carried away by some confused thoughts.
In 1984, Mark Knopfler praised Dylan’s songwriting: “To hear the first lines of ‘I and I’ that’s enough to make anybody who writes songs want to retire. It’s stunning.”131 And Knopfler blesses the song from the first note with his Stratocaster, producing the outstanding phrasing as only he could. The feeling of the song is ethereal, sober, but also dark. Although no overdub was done, an acoustic guitar is heard, played by either Knopfler or Taylor, who already played his Gibson Les Paul. “I and I” was recorded on April 27 in eight takes. The sixth was chosen for Infidels.