Sarah Jarosz / Love the Coopers (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) / 2011
Ring Them Bells
solemn, urgent, mournful
This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1989 song, urging church bells to be rung as an alarm against a world sliding into moral confusion. The lyric moves through a series of biblical and folkloric addressees, stacking apocalyptic imagery until the call to ring bells becomes both a lament and a demand for reckoning.
moral decay religious urgency apocalyptic imagery lost innocence call to witness
Who's speaking
An unnamed speaker addresses a series of saints, biblical figures, and abstract groups directly, commanding them to ring bells; the tone is prophetic rather than personal, more sermon than confession.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a linear story so much as accumulate warnings. Each verse names a different addressee and a different corner of decline: cosmic disorder, industrial busyness, a sleeping shepherd and scattered flock, marginalized listeners, and finally a besieged fortress where right and wrong blur. The refrain never resolves; it only intensifies as the imagery darkens toward the final image of eroding moral distinction.
How it's built
Built almost entirely on repetition and address -- each verse opens with the same command, varying only the person being summoned (a heathen crowd, Saint Peter, Martha, an unnamed collective, Saint Catherine). This litany structure mimics liturgy itself, and the escalating list of who must ring the bells (and why) substitutes for conventional narrative development. The fourth verse breaks the pattern slightly, stacking short parallel clauses in quick succession, which functions as the song's emotional peak before the final verse's return to a single addressee.
Section by section
Opening verse
The command begins broadly, aimed at an undefined crowd, and immediately distorts scale and time, suggesting the world itself has come unmoored..The bride detail hints at a wedding or covenant gone wrong, though the image stays deliberately unresolved..],{
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Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated command to ring bells opens nearly every line, creating a chant-like, ritualistic momentum that mirrors the act of bell-ringing itself.
- apocalyptic imagery
- References to reversed time, a world tilted on its side, and a setting sun over a sacred symbol evoke biblical end-times language without ever naming a specific event.
- catalog/list structure
- The song proceeds by listing addressees and afflicted groups rather than following a plot, which builds cumulative weight instead of dramatic tension.
- rhetorical question
- A late question about who will judge the judges destabilizes the moral authority the song has been invoking, injecting doubt into what otherwise sounds like certainty.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About Sarah Jarosz
Sarah Ellen Jarosz is an American singer-songwriter from Wimberley, Texas. Her debut studio album, Song Up in Her Head, was released in 2009 on Sugar Hill Records and the track "Mansinneedof" was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Country Instrumental Performance.
b. 1991 / United States
Full biography and catalogue