‘It speaks straight from the heart’: Bryan Ferry, Adele and Engelbert Humperdinck on Bob Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love
When Adele covered Bob Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love on her debut album 19, her interpretation was a sparse piano ballad that exuded tortured romantic longing. “The lyrics are just amazing and summed up exactly what I’d been trying to say in my songs,” Adele said then. “It’s about regretting not being with someone, and it’s beautiful.”
The heartbreak resonated. Originally released in October 2008, Adele’s take on Make You Feel My Love ended up a Top 5 UK hit two years later. But hers is hardly the only cover of the song to have had a lasting impact. First appearing on Dylan’s Grammywinning 1997 album Time Out of Mind – newly rereleased with previously unheard material – Make You Feel My Love has been tackled by the likes of Billy Joel, Pink, Neil Diamond, Kelly Clarkson and Boy George. In the process it has become a rare recent entry in the Great American Songbook.
How did it become a standard? For author and journalist David Cantwell, it’s a reflection of Dylan’s later-career stylistic shift. “So much classic Dylan is known for its layered irony and hurtling verses,” he says. “But his later, slow to mid-tempo ballads align more closely to the Great American Songbook’s musical and emotional values.”
Daniel Lanois, who produced Time
Out of Mind, says Make You Feel My Love “arrived as a latecomer” during the album sessions, when recording had relocated to Miami, Florida. “It was a surprise – but we like surprises.” As is evident from Dylan’s recording – a dreamy take with spectral piano, sombre organ and a full-throated vocal performance – the song didn’t take much in the way of production guidance. “It was pretty much straight off the floor – live vocal – and a nice reminder that a spontaneous moment can be captured that way,” Lanois says.
Its simplicity was what appealed to Engelbert Humperdinck, who interpreted it as a wistful duet with Willie Nelson on his 2014 album Engelbert Calling. “There are certain songs that run through the cracks of a broken heart and quietly connect,” he says. “It doesn’t need a huge arrangement or big vocals.” Having Nelson as a foil added a new dimension, says Humperdinck, underscoring the song’s malleability. “When you put Willie on it, the love in the song can also relate to his love of music and the writers who weathered many a storm.”
Bryan Ferry turned in a lush, elegant take brimming with vulnerability and reverence on his 2007 album Dylanesque. He also gravitated toward the song’s directness. “I think this is one of his best songs: simple and direct, and it speaks straight from the heart. Maybe that explains why it has such universal appeal. Everyone can relate to it.”
Don Was, who co-produced Dylan’s 1990 album Under the Red Sky, also produced a version of the song by US country star Garth Brooks for the 1998 film Hope Floats. He praised its precise imagery and relatability but also observed that Dylan’s performance creates thematic and emotional ambiguity. “Does he believe he’s going to get the girl, or doesn’t he? You suspect he doesn’t … [But] Bob did this in his vocal – he walked the line. He never gave away whether he felt defeated or optimistic. That’s the suspense of the song.”
Other musicians have taken a firmer interpretive stance. On a 2017 cover that later appeared in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun approaches the song from a confident place, her bold vocal delivery augmented by plucked acoustic guitar and shivering strings. “The love described in this song is so patient, unconditional,” she says. “It’s the ‘I’m there for you no matter what’ kind of love.”
Adele has since softened her lovelorn interpretation of the song, dedicating it to superfan Stormzy at a 2016 show and singing it to a couple who were engaged on stage during her 2021 concert at LA’s Griffith Observatory.
The songwriter himself also deliberately amplified its softer side. The original recording includes a pair of selfreferential, boastful lines: “The winds of change are blowin’ wild and free / You ain’t seen nothing like me yet.” But Dylan changed this section substantially in live and alternate versions, preferring instead a sentiment that ties back to the earlier lyric about rain: “Put your hand in mine and come with me / I’ll see that you don’t get wet.”
To Brun, that fealty makes the song special and enduring. “The dedication and loyalty that the lyrics express is something I think everyone longs to feel in life, as the receiver and the giver.”
Perhaps that feeling explains the abundance of Make You Feel My Love covers, says Lanois. “People like romantic songs, don’t they? It’s a very deep, romantic song. It’s nice to hear Bob deliver such a sentiment.”
• Bob Dylan’s Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series Vol 17 is out now on Columbia/Legacy
• This article was amended on 31 January 2023. An earlier version mistakenly said the ‘Winds of change’ couplet does not appear on Dylan’s original recording of the song
of me. But not this day. His voice was soulful and passionate. I didn’t have to think twice about who I could get to sing my song.” But Barrett remembered the story differently, locating the song’s origin in a vamp on Ray Charles’ What’d I Say? that he was idly tooling around with while Gordy was assembling Motown’s recording studio, Hitsville USA. “I was playing that piano lick when Mr Gordy said, ‘What’s that?’,” Strong told journalist Don Waller in 1999. “I said, ‘I don’t know’. So they wrote the lyrics and we recorded it.” This “confusion” over the true provenance of the song would later come to haunt Strong.
A shoestring operation, the budget of the embryonic Motown didn’t stretch to a drummer for Money, so Brian Holland (later to become, with brother Eddie and friend Lamont Dozier, one-third of the label’s legendary in-house songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland) faked the sound of a tom-tom by beating the skin of the tambourine. Gordy took the recording to DJ Larry Dixon, who played it on air. “The telephones lit up,” Strong recalled. “Two weeks later, I’m in San Francisco doing a show. I’d never been in a plane before.” The song reached No 2 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues charts and No 23 on the pop charts.
But if stardom came quickly for Strong, it slipped from his fingers just as fast. As he exited Motown, the label wiped his vocals from Jamie, the next single he was slated to release, and had Eddie Holland rerecord them, scoring a hit.
A few years later, he heard the Temptations’ 1964 smash My Girl on the radio. “I said, ‘Man, they’re doing my kind of music now. I want to go back’,” he recalled. He took the scraps of a frustrated idea, composed a killer bassline at his piano, and played it to Eddie Holland, now Motown’s A&R man. The song was I Heard It Through the Grapevine. “Being a very funky guy, [Holland] could hear where I was coming from,” Strong remembered. The label teamed him with producer Norman Whitfield, who helped Strong finish the song. First recorded by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in 1966, Gladys Knight and the Pips topped the Billboard R&B chart with it in 1967, but it was the sinister rattlesnake crawl of Marvin Gaye’s 1968 version that best realised its potent sexual paranoia. It was later memorably covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Slits.
Strong and Whitfield became
Motown’s killer new songwriter/producer team, working with the label’s star act, the Temptations. Gordy later wrote that “their collaborations yielded almost five years of continuous hits as they led the Temptations in a whole new direction toward up-tempo rhythms with lyrics that reflected a growing social consciousness”. Strong described the many timely, political hits the band enjoyed with the duo – pioneering soul-funk jams like Ball of Confusion, Cloud Nine, War and Psychedelic Shack – as “a sign of the times”. War was inspired by friends and relatives who’d returned from the ongoing Vietnam conflict maimed or in bodybags. “You talk about these things with your families, so that inspires you to say something about it.”
A modest soul, he was quick to deflect credit to his colleagues and collaborators: of Whitfield he said, “Whenever Norman showed up at the studio, it worked”, while he described the Funk Brothers, Motown’s in-house band, as “great musicians – if it wasn’t for them, you wouldn’t be talking to me”. Strong exited Motown for the last time in 1973, recording four solo albums for other labels before retreating from the spotlight and living off the royalties from the hits he had written with Whitfield.
But he wouldn’t see any cash from that first Motown hit – he learned in 2010 that Motown had scrubbed his name from the songwriting credits for Money three years after the song was written, claiming that he had only been credited due to a “clerical error”. “For 50 years I had no idea about any of this,” he told the New York Times in 2013. His belated attempts to rectify this situation were stymied by his delayed response, but for Robert Bateman, engineer at the session where Money was written, Motown’s first star had more than a valid case. “It all emanated from Barrett Strong,” he said.