Song of the Month: Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

This is a new feature for the blog - our idea here is what song most closely ties into the mood or theme of the month. We'll pick and post one at the end of each month.

July 2009 - "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" - Bob Dylan

Easy one to guess, right? July was one of the wettest months ever for Albany, NY, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center - my county received between 200-300% of the normal July precip total. Hard rain feel several times, but pretty much every day had some precip, even if it was light.

click here to see full size version

Dylan tells stories about the origin of this song (pre-Vietnam, even pre-Cuban Missile Crisis) and in typical Dylan fashion the song has lines and phrases that leave a lot of listener latitude on applying. He says that it is not specifically about a nuclear war, but just the End. Perhaps even he didn't want to nail it down for us, leave it to our febrile imaginations to adapt it for every dangerous moment.

In any case, here it is sung by Dylan in 1964:

And here it is sung by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians (our fav cover version)