The Band’s The Weight – a semio-cognitive narratological adventure

Abstract After providing information about details of the song’s historical genesis and an exegetic Explication De Texte we proceed to analyze the lyrics as a modernist, surrealist narrative that is not always easy to make clear sense of, yet best can be understood as a classical structure of dramatic complications and possible catharsis with reference to Per Aage Brandt’s work on diegesis and narrative forces and spaces. Brandt’s contributions to cognitive narratology provide an extended framework of force dynamics, catastrophe theory and structuralist psychoanalysis – also with considerations of intentionality and imagination as integral parts of intersubjectively experienced story-worlds. Our empirical object of study departs from the original canonical recording song lyrics produced in 1968 on the album Music from Big Pink, where the many consecutive live performances by The Band and other artists remain quite faithful to the original text. To the best of our knowledge, a thorough scholarly analysis of the lyrics of The Weight has not yet been available until we now present our detailed, philological amplification on the details of this piece of art.