The cultural influences on any great artist are all but impossible to disentangle. They are incredibly complex and only partly conscious. Sean Wilentz, however, has taken a brave stab at the task in the case of Bob Dylan in this … Continue reading
. . . resides in America, creates his art out of America, helps illuminate America, but he doesn’t make his home in America. Like David Crockett, Jim Bowie, William B. Travis, among others, he’s only at home, only himself, on … Continue reading
Bob Dylan turns seventy today. I first heard a Bob Dylan song in the summer of 1963, when I was 13. It was Peter, Paul and Mary's cover of “Blowin' In the Wind”. Just about everybody heard that version of … Continue reading
In his brilliant and eccentrically revealing memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about a crucial inspiration in his development as a songwriter — the first time he heard “Pirate Jenny”, from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The lyric … Continue reading
A few more thoughts on Bob Dylan’s Christmas album . . . Bob Dylan hasn’t referenced Christmas very often in his own songs, and the most notable references have been either wistful or rueful. There were, for example, the tatty, … Continue reading
Whenever Dylan played with The Band, magic happened. Sometimes it was rough and ragged magic — Robbie Robertson one famously said, “Dylan wanted us to play the songs, he didn’t want us to learn them” — but the roughness and … Continue reading
Jean-Luc Godard always had a strong identification with Bob Dylan, a sense that their careers, their artistic journeys and even their lives were somehow linked, even though they never worked together. The idea is not as strange as it sounds. … Continue reading
What is the meaning of an individual human life? What counts, or lasts, or is enduring about it? Out of the complete originality of Lloyd Fonvielle, what “stands”? His aspiration to love and be loved. This is probably the bottom line … Continue reading
This is a kind of synthetic folk song, like “Old Man River” — a Tin Pan Alley evocation of the existential laments found in the black musical repertoire. “Synthetic” doesn’t mean phoney — it’s more like a paean to the … Continue reading
There is no such thing. People don’t come here from other places and become American. They come here and make America a little bit like the places they came from. I believe I am part Irish because I love George … Continue reading
Bob Dylan’s vocal instrument is not what it used to be but it’s still an expressive tool of great subtlety and power — still capable of the raspy lyricism of a Louis Armstrong or the growling fierceness of a Charley … Continue reading
Singing is often about making pretty sounds, but not always. Sometimes it’s just about breaking your heart. When a singer’s instrument starts to fail, when the dulcet tones don’t come so easily, you find out what he or she really … Continue reading
. . . courtesy of my friend Laura Leivick. The soundtrack album from the 1950 Broadway production, issued in 1954. Bob Dylan said that listening to Lotte Lenya’s performance of “Pirate Jenny” changed his idea of what a song could … Continue reading
I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home. — Bob Dylan There’s no direction home in Bob Dylan’s world because every road he could possibly take in any direction leads … Continue reading
. . . how can it be? You wanted all of them rounders . . . you never had time for me. “Delia” is one of the earliest blues songs of which we have any record, dating to around 1910. … Continue reading