I and I (song)
1983 single by Bob Dylan
"I and I" is a song by Bob Dylan that appears as the seventh track (or song number three on Side 2 of the LP) of his 1983 album Infidels. Recorded on April 27, 1983, it was released as a single in Europe in November of that year, featuring a version of Willie Nelson's "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground" as its B-side. The song was produced by Dylan and Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler.
Background and composition
The phrase "I and I" comes from the Rastafari vocabulary and refers to the "oneness" between God and humans. According to Rastafarian scholar E.E. Cashmore, "'I and I' is an expression to totalize the concept of oneness, the oneness of two persons. So God is within all of us and we're one people in fact. I and I means that God is in all human beings. The bond of Ras Tafari is the bond of God, of human being. But human being itself needs a head and the head of human being is His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I (always pronounced as the letter 'I', never as the number one or 'the first') of Ethiopia." The phrase is often used in place of "you and I".
Dylan described "I and I" as "one of them Caribbean songs.
“I and I (song)” enters the record as 1983 single by Bob Dylan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what song, single and Dylan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“I and I (song)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, song, single and Dylan provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106688569. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “I and I (song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.