In a long, rambling interview posted on his website earlier this year, Bob Dylan singled out two songs that he felt never got the attention they deserved. One was 1980’s “In the Garden,” a deep cut on Saved, the third best album in his trilogy of born-again Christian rock records. The other was “Brownsville Girl,” an 11-minute co-write with Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer-winning poet, playwright, and actor who died late last week.

For Dylan obsessives, the 1986 epic is one of his most beloved compositions, but it remains an obscure one. “Brownsville Girl” has been included on two separate greatest hits sets, but he’s only played it live once, back in ’86. The song often performs well on rankings of Dylan tunes, but it also appears on what is almost unanimously agreed to be his worst album. Defined by its contradictions, “Brownsville Girl” is precisely what one would expect when the two great talents put their heads together.

During its 17 verses, the pair expresses parallel anxieties about the creative process (“If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now”), cracks jokes (“The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter/Is that his name wasn't Henry Porter”), and lands on some genuinely poignant realizations (“Strange how people who suffer together/Have stronger connections than people who are most content”). They also repeatedly celebrate the career of actor Gregory Peck and offer a plot synopsis of his 1950 western, The Gunfighter. More than any of Dylan’s collaborative lyrics, this one feels like a conversation. The fact that it not only comes together as a cohesive song but also finds a weird cosmic payoff is a testament to Dylan and Shepard’s fruitful creative relationship.

“Working with Dylan is not like working with anybody else,” Shepard reflected in a 2004 interview with the Village Voice. He described the outdoor writing session that led to “Brownsville Girl” with a wistful, somewhat cryptic haze, contrasting Dylan with his other musical collaborators (John Cale; Patti Smith, whom he’d also dated in the early ’70s). “With Dylan, you’re continuing on this hunt for what he’s after, who he is, this continual mystery about his identity,” Shepard said.

Prior to “Brownsville Girl,” Shepard had gone looking for Dylan in the mid-’70s, tagging along on his Rolling Thunder Revue and eventually publishing a poetic accompaniment called the Rolling Thunder Logbook (glorious photos and excerpts can be found here). “I thought Sam was there to write a movie,” touring guitarist T Bone Burnett admitted in the foreword. The misunderstanding seemed warranted: Shepard’s role in the endeavor was largely ambiguous. Originally planning to write a script about the experience, he decided to pursue a more imagistic account, depicting the confusion, chaos, and creativity that defined this era of Dylan’s career. The entirety of a chapter titled “If a Mystery Is Solved” reads as follows: