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"A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a song written by Bob Dylan in the summer of 1962 and recorded later that year for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963). Its lyrical structure is modeled after the question and answer form of traditional ballads such as "Lord Randall".
The song is characterized by symbolist imagery in the style of Arthur Rimbaud, communicating suffering, pollution, and warfare. Dylan has said that all of the lyrics were taken from the initial lines of songs that "he thought he would never have time to write." Nat Hentoff quoted Dylan as saying that he immediately wrote the song in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, although in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan attributed his inspiration to the feeling he got when reading microfiche newspapers in the New York Public Library: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."
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