Music / ↳ Where Were You Last Night?

Where Were You Last Night?

Written by: The full band Lead vocals: Bob Dylan and George Harrison, duet Length: 3:03 to 3:04 Album: Vol. 3, track 7

A tale of jealousy and suspicion played mostly for laughs, "Where Were You Last Night?" pairs Dylan and Harrison as dueling voices in what plays out almost like a comic dialogue between a scorned partner and whoever's on the receiving end of the questioning. Dylan has fun leaning into the role of the wronged party, delivering his lines with the kind of theatrical exasperation that suggests nobody in the room was taking the premise too seriously.

The track keeps the album's tempo brisk right through its middle stretch, functioning as a palate cleanser between the sitar-and-cynicism of "The Devil's Been Busy" and the deliberate genre detour of "7 Deadly Sins." It's not a song built for close analysis so much as a reminder that even in the more muted, post-Orbison version of this band, the chemistry between its remaining members was still very much intact.

Short, brisk, and unpretentious, it's the kind of track that rarely gets singled out in reviews but that longtime fans tend to name when asked which Vol. 3 deep cut they'd rescue first.

Previous track: Poor House. Next track: Cool Dry Place. Or see the full Vol. 3 tracklist.