Desolation Row

The words

A long carnival of literary, historical and invented characters in a ruined town where everything is upside down.

The song wanders through a broken town where figures from history, literature and legend act out absurd scenes: Cinderella, Romeo, Einstein, the Phantom of the Opera and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot among them. Each verse adds another strange tableau of violence, fear or foolishness, with Desolation Row standing for the place where the clear-sighted end up. In the last verse the singer answers a letter by asking for no more unless it comes from there. It is long, acoustic and hypnotic.