It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here. Yes, of course it’s a parody of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but what seem to be surreal mid-’60s Dylan lyrics all have something in common. The title itself is a clue, but I didn’t catch on until he got to “Madam I’m Adam.”
The song appeared on Yankovic’s 2003 album “Poodle Hat,” but he wrote it in 2002, a numerical palindrome. He explained, “Well, I thought, ‘I wonder if I could write a song completely out of palindromes?’ … So I started putting the rhymes together and putting the verses together and basically making a poem out of these palindromes. And I looked at them and I thought, ‘Well, this … this is really just a random jumble, but it looks like it should mean something.'” That’s when he realized it sounded like an outtake from “Highway 61 Revisited.”
