Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat) - Wikipedia

"Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" is a rock track, with a "cinematic" opening.[6]

In a March 1978 interview, a few weeks before recording the final version of "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" that was released on the album, Dylan told interviewer Barbara Kerr: "Each man struggles within himself. That is where the fight is ... If you can deal with the enemy within then no enemy without can stand a chance".[7] Patrick Webster notes Dylan's statement alongside the song referring to a fight with a twin – an "enemy within".[7] Heylin quoted from Dylan's interview with Kerr to support his view that the song is about "man at war with that most deadly enemy – the one within." Heylin noted that Dylan expressed similar comments to the ones he made to Kerr in an interview with Robert Shelton from around the same time, when Dylan told Shelton that "it's all in those last two verse of that last song."

Other lyrical allusions identified by Heylin were to "The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit", a traditional anti-drinking song that Alan Lomax had made a 1937 field recording of, and to Robert Johnson's "Travelling Riverside Blues" (1937).[a] Dylan's lyrics include "I bit into the root of forbidden fruit / With the juice running down my leg" and Johnson's song has: "You can squeeze my lemon 'til the juice run down my leg".[10][4][citation needed]

Michael Gray noted that the line "Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees," echoes Johnson's description of the blues in "Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)" (1938)[b] as "a low-down achin' heart disease," and Dylan's "he should have stayed where his money was green" may reference Johnson's line "we can make our money green" in "Little Queen of Spades" (1937).[13][c]

Gray considered that the album Street-Legal was "surely a charting of Dylan's move to embracing Christ".[14] The song's Biblical language ("sacrifice, demon, forbidden fruit, paradise") employed by Dylan was discussed by Biblical literature scholar Michael Gilmour, who argued that the track prefigured the religious focus of Dylan's next albums. Gilmour observed that the opening line of the song refers to a "long-distance train" and how Dylan's next album was entitled Slow Train Coming.[15] R. Clifton Spargo and Anne Ream do not regard Street-Legal as an album with a Christian focus, though believe similarly to Gilmour that it was a "harbinger of things to come."[16] Heylin, and authors Phillippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, speculated that the references in the lyrics "I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John / Strong men belittled by doubt" are to St. John the Divine and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel.[4][1]

Nogowski called the track "a sharply drawn, dramatic summation of all [Dylan] was going through at the time ... He was a troubled man, and he sounds like one here".[3] The poet Stephen Scobie also felt that the song has an autobiographical element, and may refer to Dylan's divorce settlement in the line, "Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes".[17][10] Law scholar Michael L. Perlin took the phrase "the law looks the other way" from the song to be "an example of what Dylan sees as the legal process' disinterest in truth".[18]