For many critics the most unsettling, because it is the most obvious, contradiction in Taylor’s work is his relationship to rock & roll, a style he occasionally embraces, but with a scholarly gentility that minimizes the vulgar and exhibitionist elements of rock — elements without which it cannot live — and treats it more as an exploration of musical dialect. This track, of the same name as the album title, reflects the psychological reunion between material and incorporeal perceptions of reality. This cut depicts with striking imagery the contradictions between social integration and visionary solitude, locating both possibilities in the autobiographical persona of the walking man, “moving in silent desperation/Keeping an eye on the Holy Land, a hypothetical destination.” At the end of the song, Taylor bids “so long” to this isolated figure, a metaphor for the once-dominant darker half of a divided sensibility.