Discography / It Makes No Difference

It Makes No Difference

Widely considered Rick Danko's finest vocal performance in the group's entire catalog, a slow, devastated ballad about heartbreak that refuses to resolve into anything like acceptance. Robertson wrote it, and has said he was thinking about the way people claim time heals all wounds, except, in his words, in some cases it doesn't, and this was meant to be one of those cases. Danko pushes his voice to its limit across the song, cracking and straining in places rather than smoothing everything into a polished take, a choice that reads as fully intentional given how carefully produced the rest of the album is.

The song closes with an extended instrumental duet between Robertson's guitar and Garth Hudson's saxophone, trading phrases back and forth in a way that functions almost as a second vocal, wordless where the lyric has run out of words. It became one of the three songs from Northern Lights–Southern Cross performed at The Last Waltz, alongside "Ophelia" and "Acadian Driftwood," and is generally ranked among the small handful of songs, across the group's whole ten-album output, that best represent what made their singers distinctive.

Notable versions

• The Band, Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975), lead vocal Danko
• Live at The Last Waltz (1978)