What “I Shall Be Released” means

Some links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, this site may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.

A Bob Dylan song that the Band made indelibly their own, “I Shall Be Released” closes Music from Big Pink in a high, trembling falsetto and has become one of the great secular hymns of redemption.

What it's about

On its surface it's the lament of a prisoner: a man behind a wall, hearing another inmate “swear he's not to blame” and “crying out that he was framed,” holding onto the belief that “any day now, I shall be released.” Dylan wrote it in 1967 with the Band at Big Pink, during the Basement Tapes sessions, and it carries the influence of gospel music.

But the release it imagines isn't only from a literal cell. Critics read it as being about freedom in the largest sense — release from injustice, from the mind's own prisons, even from physical existence itself. That openness is exactly why it's been sung at countless benefits and farewells: it can mean whatever release you most need.

Manuel makes it a hymn

Richard Manuel sings the Band's version in a keening falsetto, with Rick Danko and Levon Helm rising behind him on the chorus — “like sunlight pouring through a stained-glass window,” as one writer put it. It's gentler and more churchlike than Dylan's own readings.

The last word at The Last Waltz

Fittingly, it was the song chosen to end the road. At The Last Waltz in 1976, nearly every guest of the night crowded the stage — with Ringo Starr and Ron Wood joining in — for a mass singalong of “I Shall Be Released.” A song about deliverance, to close a farewell.