Shooting Star

"Shooting Star" is a song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in 1989 as the tenth and final track on his album Oh Mercy. It was produced by Daniel Lanois. Composition and recording In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recalls writing the song after taking a long motorcycle ride with his wife, Carolyn Dennis, during a break from recording his album Oh Mercy in New Orleans: "The song came to me complete, full in the eyes like I'd been traveling on the garden pathway of the sun and just found it. It was illuminated. I'd seen a shooting star from the backyard of our house, or maybe it was a meteorite". Dylan scholar Tony Attwood describes it as an otherwise simple song of lost love ("the traveller moving on is the woman, while the man does the 'you wanted me to be someone I couldn’t be' thing and is seemingly left behind") that is made more complex by an unusual musical and lyrical bridge in which "all hell breaks loose". Attwood describes how Dylan moves down the chromatic scale note by note in this bridge, only the second time in his career for him to do this (following 1967's "Too Much of Nothing"), as he sings about the apocalypse: "You can hear it by playing each note, black or white, that are next to each other on the piano. Dylan does it starting on C sharp, going down to C, B, B flat, A. (C sharp minor) Listen to the engine, (C) listen to the bell