"Ain't Talkin" is a song written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, appearing as the tenth and final track on his 2006 album Modern Times.
They describe the music as a "fresco with multiple sonic colors (viola, arpeggiated style on acoustic guitar, upright bass)" and note that although Dylan sings in "a searching, even resigned tone", the shift to a major key at the end of the song suggests "optimism".
We must pray specifically from the mother - perhaps an allusion to the Shekhinah, the feminized persona of the divine presence according to the theosophic symbolism of the kabbalah - in spite of the fact that evil dwells in the human heart".
[4] In a 2006 review of Modern Times, The Guardian critic Kitty Greene wrote, "The superlative final sally, 'Ain't Talkin'', does what all last tracks should do: make you want to hear the whole thing again.
[5] Allmusic's Thom Jurek wrote about the song, "The great irony is in the final track, 'Ain't Talkin',' where a lonesome fiddle, piano, and hand percussion spill out a gypsy ballad that states a yearning, that amounts to an unsatisfied spiritual hunger.
"Ain't Talkin'," Modern Times' bone-chilling closer, swipes lines from the traditional 'The Wayfaring Stranger' and The Stanley Brothers' 'Highway of Regret', then flips the songs' sentiments on their head: It's not deliverance that Dylan's yearning for, but vengeance, vowing to slit his enemies' throats in their beds.
Richard F. Thomas, the George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, noted in an interview that the song's final line "In the last outback, at the world's end" is a "direct quote from Peter Green's Penguin translation of Ovid's exile poetry [Ex Ponto 2.7.66].
[17] An earlier take of the song from the Modern Times recording sessions, without the long instrumental intro or outro and featuring somewhat different lyrics (with no references to the work of Ovid), appeared on the 2008 Dylan compilation The Bootleg Series Vol.