"GONNA CHANGE MY WAY OF THINKING" was originally recorded in May 1979 for "Slow Train Coming".

A rewritten version of "GONNA CHANGE MY WAY OF THINKING" was recorded in March 2002 for the long awaited covers compilation "Gotta Serve Somebody - The Gospel Songs Of Bob Dylan", which was finally released in spring 2003 (for details see picture link below, which leads to the website about this project).

On my first copy of Slow Train Coming, back in the old days, there was a huge gap before ‘Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking’, its length depending on the speed with which I could get up, walk over to the turntable, and flip the vinyl so the needle could drop on side two of my first and still favourite Bob Dylan record, kicking off this extremely underrated song.

It would have been a nice idea to have another huge gap, maybe 15 to 20 seconds, before this raucous blues track by Bob Dylan and his 2002 touring band, indicating its stylistic dissimilarity to the ten gospel songs preceding it. This however, to be honest, would have been the only amendment I would have suggested. The song, which is the only song on the album recorded and mixed by Chris Shaw, who also recorded and mixed “Love And Theft”, is indeed a worthy contribution to the project.

One verse of the rewritten lyrics of the song, starting with ‘Jesus is calling, He’s coming back to gather His jewels.’, somehow foreshadows ‘A Voice From On High’, which was performed later that year. But my favourite lines of the rewrite would be ‘The sun (Son?) is shining, ain’t but one train on this track’, and ‘Storms on the ocean, storms out on the mountain too. Oh Lord, You know I have no friend without You’. And of course, I do find the staged dialogue with Mavis Staples simply hilarious, in a good sense.





At the end of this 2002 studio performance of "GONNA CHANGE MY WAY OF THINKING" there is a reference to the seventh verse of Oscar Wilde's "THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL" (this verse is also repeated as the last of the 109 verses of this long ballad):

"YET EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES,
BY EACH LET THIS BE HEARD,
SOME DO IT WITH A BITTER LOOK,
SOME WITH A FLATTERING WORD,
THE COWARD DOES IT WITH A KISS
THE BRAVE MAN WITH A SWORD!"





And here is an interesting part from an interview with Mavis Staples:

Question: "According to what I heard on the CD, you arrived at the studio when Bob was singing and he stopped to let you in and to welcome you. Was that what really happened? Was that set up?"

Mavis Staples: "... Oh, this was Bobby´s idea, a slapstick kind of thing. So I knocked on the door and he said "Oh, it´s Mavis Staples" and I said "What are you doing here?", you know, and then we got to sing the song and it was a jam. We were there in O´Henry´s studio in Los Angeles, California with Bobby´s band and this session lasted way over into the morning. He wouldn´t stop! I said "Bobby, it´s down, it´s good", and he kept saying, "No Mavis, no Mavis, we gotta do it some more". And I said "Well, we gotta eat first", so we went out and got some Mexican food and then we got started again and we musta left the studio at about four o´clock in the morning; for one song! It turned out really good though and we were nominated for the Grammy. We didn´t win. Sting won that Grammy, but it was an honor to do that."