The Poetry of Pop By Adam Bradley

FARRAH KARAPETIAN, SOUNDSCAPE 36, 2015, UNIQUE CHROMOGENIC PHOTOGRAM, METALLIC, 40″ X 45″. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DANZIGER GALLERY.

Most of us don’t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between “Talkin’ New York” (1962) and “Thunder on the Mountain” (2006). But let’s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: “Blue” Bland, Brown, Gentry. It’s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term “poet” is a kind of coronation, we’re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do.

Perhaps Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning—of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The poetry in pop songs can be masterful or careless, disposable or timeless. It can be in the service of well-crafted narratives (like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”) or more abstract tone pieces (like Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw”). It can result in works that endure (like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s signature song “Turn On Your Love Light,” covered dozens of times including, famously, by Bob Weir’s Grateful Dead) or works that capture a moment and then recede into nostalgia (like Bobby Brown’s chart-topping 1989 hit “My Prerogative”).

In my new book, The Poetry of Pop, I make the case for taking pop songs seriously—without being too serious about it. Few of us first encounter song lyrics on the page as poetry or as sheet music. Instead, we experience lyrics as sound, usually recorded and sometimes live. Page-born poems and song lyrics are not the same things, but they are drawn together by affinities of sound and silence, patterns of language, and shared games with words.

What follows is a selection from the book’s appendix, which is made up of lists like “Fifteen Lyrics that Effectively Rhyme ‘Moon’ with ‘June,’ ” “Some Whispers, Some Screams,” and “Twenty Epistolary Recordings.” My favorite list is the one included here, in which I asked nine poets to suggest a song lyric that they believe rewards close attention. Their selections span nearly half a century of sound, crossing multiple genres and inviting the kind of interest that will make you pull up a second tab on your web browser and listen to the song for yourself.

How do poets listen to pop songs? Do they hear things the rest of us don’t? Do they count the rhythms of the lines? Do they separate the half from the full rhymes? Do they feel the song more fully because of their knowledge of the inner workings of syllables and sounds, or does that knowledge get in the way of listening? These nine poets answer affirmatively that poets do, in fact, notice things in song lyrics that might otherwise escape our attention. Their sensitivity and vision can guide us.



So read pop songs like poems. Sing poems like pop songs. Both acts may seem unnatural, perhaps even perverse at first. Some parts won’t fit. Some sounds will clash. But the practice brings new clarity and insight. Poetic tools of sound, meaning, and feeling are at work in even the most banal pop song, just as they are at work in even the most trite ode or sonnet. The dance of word and music makes songs act on our imagination and emotions just as the best poems do. Attentive readers, like the nine poets below, unlock mysteries of lyric expression through the poetics of form, as well as through ineffable qualities of voice and music. This is the poetry of pop.

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H. L. Hix picks Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967). It will surely be the most uncool choice in this playlist, and it was long “before my time” (I didn’t encounter it until many years after it had disappeared off the charts), but Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” brilliantly achieves (in a song that is all lyrics—the guitar just keeps the rhythm) a poetic value I find powerful: subordination of event to situation. “Ode to Billie Joe” seems ostensibly about events: the narrator and Billie Joe throwing something off the bridge, Billie Joe jumping off the bridge, and so on. But although those events get named, they are mostly withheld: we don’t know what the pair were throwing off the bridge, we don’t know why Billie Joe killed himself. What is revealed with utter clarity is the narrator’s situation: she is spoken to and spoken about within the poem, but she herself is never allowed to speak; she is closely monitored (told to wipe her feet, interrogated for not eating, observed and reported on) but not recognized at all; she is kept in place by her society, but is afforded no place in her society; kinship relations are enforced on her from without, but the kinship she feels is denied her. In Gottlob Frege’s terms, “Ode to Billie Joe” obscures reference in order to disclose sense. In Aristotle’s terms, “Ode to Billie Joe” inverts the tragic focus on mythos for a lyric focus on ethos. The narrator makes no explicit criticism of her society, but her implicit critique is devastating. She does not declare her social alienation and erasure, but I feel it all the more strongly for its not being declared. Her protest takes the form of lamentation. I experience “Ode to Billie Joe” as a most robust fulfillment of Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Kyle Dargan picks Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” (1971). Anyone who has taken a workshop with me has heard my idea about writing poetry being like building the lightest possible plane that will fly. Sometimes, that is. There is a place for excess, for everything in poetic intent, but, staying with this idea of efficiency and vicious concision, Marvin Gaye and James Nyx’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” has impressed me for a long time by capturing so much depth and nuance with so little. The sense of being caught in an inescapable, economic spiral builds over the verses, but let’s start with the second: “Inflation, no chance/ to increase finance. / Bills pile up sky high./ Send that boy off to die.” “Inflation, no chance” is an economics white paper in itself, but the juxtaposition of all four lines makes it possible to see a connection among poverty, loss of economic ground, and the pressures to enlist (and die) in the army. A sparse, quiet but wrenching verse that creates space for the “holler” to emerge as the chorus.

Evie Shockley picks Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” (1976). Set with an impossible task (pick one??), I default to the songwriter who, for me, set the standard of song lyrics as poetry. “Hejira” is not my top Joni Mitchell song for listening, but these are definitely the lyrics I’d most want to read. From the gorgeous one-word title (an Arabic word signifying a flight from danger or journey to a more congenial place), we move into the “melancholy” meditation of a woman who travels to escape from “the petty wars / that shell shock love away.” She’s recovering from a relationship that seems to have been overpowering— relieved to be released back to herself, but at the same time in withdrawal. The quatrain that moves me perhaps most of all carries forward both her theme of duality and her breathtaking talent for making abstractions tangible through metaphorical images: “In the church they light the candles / And the wax rolls down like tears / There’s the hope and the hopelessness / I’ve witnessed thirty years.” There. One image does double duty, daring us to pretend that the fire burning within us is not also burning us, or that we can avoid for long being “suck[ ed] … back” into connection with others by our need to and for love.

Raza Ali Hasan picks Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (1980). W. H. Auden reputedly mined the Beatles songbook in his search for new influences for his own work. I am no Auden, but in the poem “British Steel,” which is the last poem in my newest poetry collection, Sorrows of the Warrior Class (2015), I riff on lines not from the Beatles but from an American band: “Once in a Lifetime, / you may find yourself, / pondering how the English,” is the first stanza. The line “you may find yourself ” appears another three times, and “you may tell yourself,” twice. The final stanza goes like this: “You may say to yourself / Same as it ever was. / Same as it ever was.” Yes, you guessed it, I am talking of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” The British, as the title of the poem implies, steal in three different ways. In the poem, the British are stealing steel-making technology from India. The poet (that’s me) is stealing lines from the pop song in order to call the British imperialists. But the truth is, I wasn’t stealing in order to call the British first-class thieves but to do something about the long-standing hold this song and its lines have on me. Call it jealousy, not sought-out influence. I stole those Talking Heads lines and used them verbatim in my poetic world—at last making them mine.

Douglas Kearney picks De La Soul’s “I Am I Be” (1993). It all comes together on this one—the opening chorus collage of “I am ——; I be ——” statements is the sonic predecessor of A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders cover, but lyrically it sets up a cascading and layered anaphora (which Pos reprises at the head of his first verse and that envoi of a third; and which Dove revises in a kind of phrasal chiasmus as his last line of the second verse). Within the verses themselves, Pos remixes clichés from common English (including “I am an early bird but the feathers are black / so the apples that I catch are usually all worms”); alludes to past examples of people misunderstanding who he is and what he does (“ … to bring the peace, / not in the flower / but the As-salaam Alaik’ and the third I am.”); and, in one of the song’s loveliest moments, says simply: “I cherish the twilight”—a thorn rhyme line (though it’s assonant with “maximized” and “right size”) that, when voiced, sounds almost like a sigh relieving the density of his flow. Dove, ever underrated, abstracts his imagery to the point that I feel I can turn his words like three-dimensional objects shaped in letterforms and what he’s describing. My favorite bars—and I quote this every chance I get to show how dope he is: “I bring the element H-to-the-2 / so you owe me what’s coming / when I’m raining on your new parade”—of course, H2O, thus water. But also, H(ip) H(op) and rap’s association with water (flow, spit); “raining on your new parade” suggests battling but also De La’s place as sly critics of peers from within hip-hop culture. Please. Listen to it right now.

Noah Eli Gordon picks Jawbreaker’s “Lurker II: Dark Son of Night” (1995). Although the band’s single major-label release ultimately failed to garner them the success of their peers like Green Day and other post-punk acts of the early nineties, there’s a near cultlike following for Jawbreaker, due in no small part to Blake Schwarzenbach’s emotionally tinged, sonically attuned lyrics. Rather than the story behind domestic failure and dejection, Schwarzenbach condenses into a series of objective correlatives the emotional tenor of events—the core feelings associated with a postmodern Prufrock: “Two room condo, treeless cul-de-sac. / A nun’s dark habit. All arm, no follow through.” Here, that “All arm” also carries with it the homophonic echo of alarm, doubling the sense of a fraught relationship that is already over just a few lines later: “Hook up the Sega. Have sex alone.” True to his dexterous balance between the sonic and referential potential of words, Schwarzenbach, later in the song, offers another gem of an image in this line about a tree’s fallen fruit: “Dead in sunshine, decomposing there.” That “Dead in” is also a dead end, as well as something deadened. There is between the page and the performance, between the words as written out and the echo each carries when heard aloud, a transformative polysemy, one that, thankfully, keeps Jawbreaker very much alive.

Major Jackson picks the Fugees’ “How Many Mics” (1996). “Problem with no man / Before black, I’m first human / Appetite to write like Frederick Douglass with a slave hand.” The above excerpt from “How Many Mics,” one of the tightest cuts on the Fugees’ classic and impactful album The Score, has graced and blessed my writing space for nearly twenty years now and served as an example of how allusion and metaphor can harness and expose deeper levels of meaning. Of the talented and distinctive trio members whose cypher-like, improvisatory rhyming skills turned them into household names overnight, Wyclef, Lauryn Hill, and Pras, it is Wyclef who slips this bit of subtle black history onto the album and in one of their most successful tracks. Emcees and poets either live or die by metaphor or allusion. In the best-case scenario, metaphors and allusions create bridges, reaffirming shared knowledge, and tap into a reader or listener’s awareness and consciousness, or at worst, they can leave them hanging by their sheer unfamiliarity and novelty. No matter the genre of music, rock, hip-hop, or R& B, I have always gravitated towards those lyricist who reference history, literature, or current events: as a teenager, I thrilled in recognizing that U2’ s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a direct address of the Troubles in Ireland or that the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” was a lyric in the persona of Meursault, Albert Camus’s protagonist in the novel The Stranger. I guess listening to one of my mother’s favorite Marvin Gaye albums, What’s Going On, encouraged me to demand more from song lyrics. It could be said Wyclef built his reputation as a rapper by name-dropping, showcasing his wide range of allusions, and in “How Many Mics,” they are plentiful: by the time he has finished his portion of the song, he plays golf with David Sonenberg; runs through Crown Heights screaming mazel tov; makes deals with Tommy Mottola; wishes to survive like Seal in the song “Crazy”; notices drug fiends dance like John Travolta in the movie Grease; and narrates once getting hit by Guinness stout. But it is his reference to the famous slave narrative The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass that resonates most with me. I have always felt that hip-hop, like poetry, is a question of liberty attained through literacy, one of creation and maintenance of style that sings an individual’s life. To express oneself in words on a page or in a song is one of the highest acts of freedom. As an enslaved descendant of Africans in America, Douglass yearned for freedom, and like many black folk, found learning how to read and write the ticket toward a greater self-awareness and independence. Douglass not only writes himself into freedom but writes himself into existence, inscribes his humanity. That ongoing hunger among black folk, and indeed, in all of us, is reflected in Wyclef ’s words of immense power, yet said so succinctly and wittily, I might add.

Adrian Matejka picks Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” (1997). “When I am king, you will be first against the wall / With your opinion, which is of no consequence at all.” Sometimes, Thom Yorke’s lyrics are deeply encoded and need musical gestures to open up for the listener. But other times, as with “Paranoid Android” and many of the songs on OK Computer, the lyrics are so tight and generous to their disconnected, pre-Millennium listeners that no musical exposition is necessary. Yorke’s false bravado in these lyrics captured my frustrations and insecurities (back then and now) with being housed in our amorphous, digital neighborhoods.

Julie Carr picks Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” (2001). John McCrea sings through my car and through my son who is singing along. He’s seventeen. This song, he says, is a lesson in negative space. There’s that break, that longgggg silence just after the first “longgggg jacket”—it’s the Citibank lit up late, the empty moment between swiping your card to unlock the door and the door unlocking. There’s the little exhale after the next “long jacket,” like the breath between high school and college when you’re riding shotgun with your mom but almost done. There’s that gap between McCrea’s “I want a girl” and the backup’s “hey, ho,” “na-na na na na,” which is the space between being the boy dreaming a girl and being the woman who once was one. Then there’s the empty space at the back of the throat, what we named “flat affect” just when he was born, those Citibank years, those temp years, those liquid years strolling on even flatter Brooklyn streets. And then finally there’s that nothing, that rest or that dead space, when the song just cuts right off and the boy is gone.

Adam Bradley is professor of English and founding director of the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop and The Poetry of Pop.

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Dylan, Bob

Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan is recognized worldwide for the impact he has had on rock music since his career began in the early 1960s, and he has maintained his popularity among fans and critics alike over the ensuing decades. Although known primarily for his caustic and candid lyrics that reveal a defiant stance on authority, politics, and social norms that was prevalent in America in the 1960s, Dylan's fans come from a variety of age groups, all of whom identify with the raw human emotion expressed in his lyrics. Dylan's own humanity was brought to the public's attention in May of 1997, when the legendary artist canceled a planned European tour and was hospitalized due to a serious health condition called pericarditis. Yet Dylan returned to the stage in August, and released Time Out of Mind to rave reviews. As further evidence of Dylan's broad appeal and the magnitude of his contributions to music, he performed in Bologna, Italy, in September of 1997, after receiving a special invitation from Pope John Paul II. The notoriously private artist revealed more of his personal life with a documentary film and autobiography published in 2005.
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, to Abraham Zimmerman, a furniture and appliance salesman, and Beatty Stone Zimmerman. In 1947 the family moved to the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota, where Dylan spent an unremarkable childhood. He began writing poems at the age of ten, and as a teenager taught himself to play the piano, harmonica, and guitar. He appreciated a wide variety of music ranging from country to rock 'n' roll, and admired the works of Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Dylan played in many bands during his high school years, including the Golden Chords and Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers, before enrolling at the University of Minnesota in 1959.
While he was a student at the University of Minnesota, the artist began performing as a folk singer and musician under the name Bob Dylan at such popular Minneapolis night clubs as the Ten O'Clock Scholar cafe and St. Paul's Purple Onion Pizza Parlor. Dylan soon became more involved with his musical career than with his studies, so he dropped out of school in 1960 and headed straight for New York City. The young performer's interest in New York City was based on his desire to become involved in the emerging folk music scene in the city's Greenwich Village neighborhood, as well as his wish to meet his idol, folk singer Woody Guthrie. Dylan soon became a popular performer in Greenwich Village coffee houses and night clubs, and also managed to become a regular performer for Guthrie. The young Dylan quickly gained the respect and admiration of his peers in the folk music scene with his ability to compose his own melodies and lyrics at an astonishing pace. In 1961 he attracted notice outside of New York City's folk music scene when New York Times critic Robert Shelton witnessed one of his performances at a club called Gerde's Folk City and declared that Dylan was "bursting at the seams with talent."
Dylan was 20 years old when he released his self-titled debut album in 1962. Although most of the songs were cover tunes, Dylan did include two original compositions—"Song to Woody," a tribute to Guthrie, and "Talkin' New York." The album achieved limited success, and Dylan followed it in 1963 with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which contained more original songs that shared a common theme of protest. Two of the songs from Dylan's second album, "Blowin' In the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," became enduring anthems of the 1960s, helping to define the thoughts and feelings of the counterculture. As confirmation of Dylan's success, the renowned folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary recorded a cover version of "Blowin' In the Wind" that rose to the number two spot on the pop music charts.

The Tide Changed

By the time Dylan released 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin', he had been thrust into the role of media spokesperson for a counterculture protest movement that sought to radically alter current social and political norms. This third album also contained the protest song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." At the time the album was released, however, Dylan began to express his growing pessimism about the counterculture's ability to affect change, and declared that he was uncomfortable with his role as the movement's mouthpiece. His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, further evidenced his disillusionment with the counterculture movement, containing extremely personal folk ballads and love songs rather than his trademark protest songs. In 1965 Dylan enraged his folk music following by performing on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival (fans booed Dylan and his band off the stage), and by releasing Bringing It All Back Home, an album on which Dylan returned to his earlier musical influences of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues. While the songs on this album remained critical of society, none contained any of the direct references to racism, war, or political activism that had marked his earlier works. The acoustic song "Mr. Tambourine Man" from Bringing It All Back Home was recorded in an electrified form by the popular 1960s band the Byrds, and reached the top of the pop music charts; by that time a new brand of music known as "folk rock" had become widely favored among young Americans.

For the Record …

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, MN; name legally changed August 9, 1962; son of Abraham (a furniture and appliance salesman) and Beatty (Stone) Zimmerman; married Sara Lowndes, 1965 (divorced, 1977); children: Jesse, Maria, Jakob, Samuel, Anna. Education: Attended University of Minnesota, 1959–60.
Composed more than 500 songs since early 1960s; recorded with rock groups including The Band (1975), The Traveling Wilburys (with Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison, 1988 and 1990), and The Grateful Dead (1989); solo singer and musician in concerts since early 1960s, including appearances at Newport Folk Festival in 1962 and 1965, Woodstock Festivals in 1969 and 1994, and Live Aid benefit concert in 1985; issued new material on Time Out of Mind, 1997, and "Love and Theft," 2001; issued movie soundtrack, Masked and Anonymous, 2003; issued multiple entries in the "bootleg" series, from The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in 1998 to The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home—The Soundtrack, 2005.
Awards: Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, Tom Paine Award, 1963; Grammy Award, Best Rock Vocal Performance, for "Gotta Serve Somebody," 1979; Rolling Stone Music Award, Artist of the Year (tied with Bruce Springsteen) for The Basement Tapes, 1975; and Album of the Year for Blood on the Tracks, 1975; inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988; Commander Dans L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres from French Minister of Culture, 1990; Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 1991; Grammy Award for World Gone Wrong, 1993; Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize Trust, Arts Award, 1997; Lifetime Achievement Award, John F. Kennedy Center honors, 1997; Grammy Awards, for Album of the Year, Best Male Rock Performance, and Best Contemporary Folk Album, 1998, all for Time Out of Mind.
Addresses: Record company—Columbia Records, 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211, website: http://www.columbiarecords.com, phone: (212) 833-8000. Website—Bob Dylan Official Website: http://www.bobdylan.com.
Dylan continued to record songs that fused his folk and rock influences, using mystical, ominous lyrics filled with imagery and allusion, and in 1965 he released Highway 61 Revisited. The album featured songs with themes of alienation, including the well-known "Like a Rolling Stone," which quickly rose to the number two spot on the Billboard singles chart. That same year Dylan married Sara Lowndes, a friend of his manager's wife. In 1966 Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, which polished the edgy, harsh rock sounds of Highway 61 Revisited and introduced music unlike any of its predecessors. Although he was wildly successful, Dylan was suffering from the strains of fame. In the 1971 biography Bob Dylan the artist described his feelings during that period of his life to author Anthony Scaduto: "The pressures were unbelievable. They were just something you can't imagine unless you go through them yourself. Man, they hurt so much." Similarly, in a 1997 interview with Newsweek's David Gates, Dylan asserted "I'm not the songs. It's like somebody expecting [William] Shakespeare to be Hamlet, or [Wolfgang von] Goethe to be Faust. If you're not prepared for fame, there's really no way you can imagine what a crippling thing it can be."

Knockin' on Death's Door

On July 29, 1966, at the peak of his popularity, Dylan's neck was broken in a near-fatal motorcycle crash. The accident left Dylan with time to recuperate and rest at his Woodstock, New York, home with his wife and their newborn son, Jesse. He began reflecting upon his religious beliefs and personal priorities, and wrote songs that reflected his newfound sense of inner peace and satisfaction. Many of these songs were recorded in 1967 with The Band and later released on the 1975 album The Basement Tapes, while others were released on Dylan's first album following the motorcycle accident, 1968's John Wesley Harding. This slowerpaced acoustical album was followed in 1969 by Nashville Skyline and in 1970 by Self Portrait and New Morning. These three albums were generally panned by the public, and Dylan was criticized harshly by his fans for what they perceived as his failure to comment on the harsh realities of the time, namely the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans.
Dylan's first album to reach the number one spot on music charts was his 1974 effort Planet Waves, which he recorded with The Band. Although it was not a critical success, the album led to a flood of interest in Dylan's 1974 tour of the United States, where audience demand for tickets far exceeded available seating. In 1974, following the tour, Dylan released Before the Flood, a two-album set of music recorded live during the tour; the album rose to number three on music charts.
While Dylan's musical career was on an upswing, his personal life was in a downslide, as he became involved in a bitter separation with Sara and a fierce custody battle over their children. Dylan's 1975 album Blood On the Tracks featured songs reflecting the sorrow and passion of his personal life at the time; "If You See Her, Say Hello" referred directly to the breakup of his marriage. Many critics hailed Blood On the Tracks as Dylan's best album since the 1960s, praising the artist's use of visual imagery to blur distinctions between reality and illusion. The album's searing songs about love and loss, including "Tangled up in Blue," "Shelter from the Storm," and "Idiot Wind," were well received by fans, and the album soon reached number one on the charts. Dylan's 1976 album Desire, which contained a mournful tune titled "Sara," also reached number one on the charts and achieved widespread success in both the United States and Europe.
Although Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal was unpopular with his fans, who feared that the performer's personal crises had interfered with his musical abilities, it did not prepare the fans for what was soon to follow. In 1978, while touring to support Street Legal, Dylan experienced a religious vision that he later asserted made him question his moral values and saved him from self-destructive behavior. Pronouncing his belief in fundamentalist Christianity, Dylan began to include in his music a concern with religious salvation and the end of the world. Many fans were unhappy with the artist's apparent attempts to persuade his listeners to adopt his religious philosophy, while others viewed the lyrics as similar to Dylan's earlier songs about social change and prophecy. Of the albums during his Christian period, only the 1979 album Slow Train Coming was a commercial success, largely due to the popularity of the Grammy Award-winning single "Gotta Serve Somebody."

Dylan Reinvented Himself

In 1983 Dylan released Infidels, an album in which he departed from his overtly religious themes and returned to more complex, emotionally subtle lyrics in songs such as "Jokerman" and "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight." The 1985 album Empire Burlesque displayed a wide range of musical sounds, from gospel to acoustic ballad. In the mid-1980s Dylan remained prominent in the public eye by performing with various other music stars, including superstar Michael Jackson, on the 1985 single "We Are the World," and at the Live Aid benefit concert, both of which were designed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Also in 1985, Dylan released Biograph, a five-album set that contained previously released material and "bootleg" (unreleased) recordings, and which also included Dylan's brief commentaries; the set was highly popular and proved a top seller.
The year 1988 marked the beginning of Dylan's collaboration with the Traveling Wilburys, a group that included veteran music stars George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. The group released two albums, 1988's Traveling Wilburys and Traveling Wilburys Volume 3—no second volume was ever recorded—in 1990. In 1988 Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was honored by noted rock star Bruce Springsteen, who commented during the induction ceremony that "Bob [Dylan] freed the mind the way Elvis [Presley] freed the body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual…. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed the face of rock and roll forever."

Another Close Call

In May of 1997 Dylan was stricken with a sometimes fatal fungal infection called histoplasmosis, which caused the sac surrounding his heart to swell, resulting in a condition known as pericarditis. He told Newsweek's David Gates, "Mostly I was in a lot of pain. Pain that was intolerable. That's the only way I can put it." Nevertheless, he began to recover, and performed again in August of that same year. In September he performed for Pope John Paul II—reportedly at the Pope's request—at a eucharistic conference in Bologna, Italy. And in December of 1997 he became the first rock star ever to receive Kennedy Center honors.
Dylan's album Time Out of Mind was released in September of 1997 and was greeted by rave reviews. The album brought Dylan three Grammy Awards—for Album of the Year, Male Rock Performance (for "Cold Irons Bound"), and Contemporary Folk Album. Critics declared that the artist had again managed to reinvent himself and provide his fans with a fresh sound. Time's Christopher John Farley praised the album, declaring that "Dylan has found purpose in his inner battle to reignite his imagination. Turning the quest for inspiration itself into relevant rock—that is alchemic magic." Newsweek contributor Karen Schoemer maintained that Time Out of Mind "is rewarding precisely because it's so outside the present. In an era defined by novelty hits and slick video edits, it's a reminder that music can mean something more: it can be personal, uncompromised and deeply felt."
Following Time Out of Mind, Dylan entered a new, expansive phase of his career, one that focused attention on his current musical output and broadened the understanding of his past achievements. In 1998 Columbia Records released The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. The two-disc recording, featuring an acoustic and electric set, was recorded at Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966, and became one of the most renowned bootlegs in rock 'n' roll history. "By the mid-'70s," noted Bill Holland in Billboard, "the 'Albert Hall' bootlegs became a cultural touchstone for music fans of the hippie-era baby boomer generation."
Dylan waited until 2001 to release Love and Theft, his first album of new material since Time Out of Mind. The album received a warm reception from critics, and following on the heels of the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, represented a renaissance for Dylan. "With Love and Theft," wrote David Browne in Entertainment Weekly, "Bob Dylan's return to the land of the living is complete." Columbia also continued to release vault material, including The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975—The Rolling Thunder Review in 2002 and The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964—Concert at Philharmonic Hall in 2004.
In 2003 Dylan appeared in Masked and Anonymous, a film widely panned by critics. "Unfortunately," wrote Ethan Alter in Film Journal International, "I have to concede that the movie is largely a mess—a rambling, disjointed, semi-coherent hodgepodge that plays like a parody of a bad Dylan song."

Published Autobiography

In 2004 and 2005 Dylan, always protective of his personal privacy, wrote the first installment of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. He also agreed to participate in extensive interviews for Martin Scorsese's two-hour biographical Dylan documentary for PBS, No Direction Home. Since he first become popular in the mid-1960s, Dylan had allowed biographers and journalists to tell his story: now, with a book and a documentary, he would have his turn. Columbia seized the opportunity to release two discs worth of scattered demos, out-takes, and live recordings to accompany the documentary project. In 2006 Twyla Tharp's play "The Times They Are A-Changin," drawn from Dylan's songs, was slated to open at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California.
While Dylan has always drawn concert audiences and maintained a loyal fan base, new recordings and vault releases following Time Out of Mind have energized longtime fans and introduced him to a new generation. "Forty-plus years into his never-ending career," wrote Browne, "Bob Dylan keeps throwing us curveballs."

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Bob Dylan’s Whole Life in 30 Minutes

In a rambling, comprehensive and surprisingly biting speech, Bob Dylan gave a half-hour speech of a lifetime on Friday. Here’s what he had to say.

Last Friday night, in a remarkable speech that ran more than 30 minutes and was the talk of the industry over Grammy weekend, music legend Bob Dylan offered deeply personal thanks to a career-spanning chorus of friends and fellow musicians, colorfully smacked down a few others along the way, eviscerated decades of music critics’ complaints about his voice and his enigmatic nature, and stunned many by revealing the musical inspirations behind some of his most well-known songs.

In a rambling ode that crisscrossed a century of American music, Dylan delighted an audience of 3,000 musicians and industry veterans gathered in Los Angeles to honor him as Musicares’ 2015 Person of the Year. Musicares is the non-profit arm of the Grammys that aids impoverished musicians during times of financial and medical crisis.

The speech capped a star-studded musical tribute to Dylan, 73, by a wide variety of artists whom he handpicked to interpret his songs. The show, which was not broadcast, reportedly included performances by Beck (“Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat”); Jackson Browne (“Blind Willie McTell”); Bruce Springsteen (“Knocking on Heaven’s Door”); Neil Young (“Blowin’ In the Wind”); Jack White (“One More Cup of Coffee”); Crosby, Stills and Nash (“Girl From the North Country”); Tom Jones (“What Good Am I?”); Willie Nelson (“Senor”) and Los Lobos (“On a Night Like This”). This piece is based on a transcript of the speech published by Rolling Stone.

The diversity of the lineup proved to highlight a key theme in Dylan’s subsequent speech, in which he offered surprisingly tender thanks to Peter, Paul and Mary, who turned “Blowin’ In the Wind” into a hit song and—Dylan explained—taught him a lot about the mutability of a song, and how reinterpretation can open up myriad new possibilities in a song.

“[I] have to mention some of the early artists, who recorded my songs very, very early, without having to be asked,” Dylan told the audience. “Just something that they felt was right for them. I’ve got to say thank you to Peter, Paul and Mary, who I knew all separately before they became a group. I didn’t even think of myself as writing songs for others to sing but it was starting to happen and it couldn’t have happened to—or with—a better group,” he said.

“They took a song of mine that… was buried on one of my records and turned it into a hit song. Not that way that I would have done it,” Dylan intoned in his inimitable style. “They straightened it out.”

The artist also offered a surprisingly sweet appreciation for other sugary 1960s pop groups like The Turtles, The Byrds and Sonny & Cher, who also turned early Dylan songs into top pop hits. He poked fun at both the bands and himself.

“Their versions of the songs were like commercials,” he explained, to laughter in the audience. “But I didn’t really mind that because 50 years later my songs were being used in the commercials. So that was good, too. I was glad it happened, and I was glad they’d done it.”

In 2004, Dylan baffled virtually everyone when he appeared in a “Victoria’s Secret” television commercial with angel Adriana Lima and others, allowing the lingerie company to license his song “Love Sick.” The unexpected move prompted now-familiar outrage at Dylan for “selling out,” with one writer ruefully noting that “forty years ago, [Dylan’s] motto was ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Today, it’s ‘stretch-lined demi-bra with lace.’”

After thanking his earliest interpreters, Dylan firmly placed his own career within a contrasting lineage of American music. It all grew out of the folk songwriting tradition, Dylan said, and his work was embodied by the songs of his true heroes. There was Sun Studios’ legendary sound man Sam Phillips, he said, who discovered Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. He called Nina Simone an “overwhelming artist” who “validated everything I was about” when she recorded his songs. He wished the Staples Singers had done the same. He cited Joan Baez as “a woman of devastating honesty” and Johnny Cash as “a hero of mine.”

Dylan recounted the famous March 1964 letter to the editor that Cash, already a country legend at 32, wrote to Sing Out! magazine, a highly-influential folk magazine which had published a complaint-filled “open letter” to Dylan. Sing Out! was, to 1960s folk purists, roughly what the New Yorker is to many self-styled urban intellectuals. The magazine’s broadside accused Dylan, 23, of going Hollywood and abandoning his roots in strictly traditional folk music.

Cash, who had never met Dylan at that point, penned a powerful defense of the young artist that concluded, memorably, with “SHUT UP and let him sing!”

Years later, in a full-page ad in a 1998 Billboard magazine, Cash and producer Rick Rubin would again slam the Nashville establishment scene, which had similarly shunned the country legend late in his career.

Dylan spoke reverently of Cash in his speech on Friday night, infusing his tribute with prose that evoked the Bible, the book that had proven perhaps most precious to both men throughout their careers.

“Johnny was an intense character,” Dylan said in his speech. “And he saw that people were putting me down playing electric music, and he posted a letter to magazines scolding people, telling them to shut up and let him sing. In Johnny Cash’s world—hardcore Southern drama—that kind of thing didn’t exist. Nobody told anybody what to sing or what not to sing. I’m always going to thank him for that. Johnny Cash was a giant of a man—the man in black. And I’ll cherish the friendship we had until the day there is no more days.”

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Then, Dylan did something extraordinary: He began to demonstrate precisely how some of the hundreds of songs he heard and sang as a young folk artist would beget some of his own most legendary lyrics.

It was Cash’s groundbreaking ballad “How High’s The Water, Mama?” with its signature narrative refrain that inspired Dylan’s own groundbreaker “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

“I wrote [“It’s Alright”] with that [“How High”] reverberating in my head,” Dylan said, astonishing some audience members. “I still ask, ‘How high’s the water, mama?’”

He went on to tie “John Henry” to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” to “Highway 61,” and “Deep Ellum Blues” to “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.”

The revelations called to mind charges in recent years that some of his lyrics and parts of his memoir, “Chronicles,” were plagiarized. Dylan’s songwriting technique was rather vigorously defended by literary scholars last summer when the issue reemerged.

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth—there was a precedent. For three or four years all I listened to were folk songs. I went to sleep singing folk songs.

If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me,” he said, and then quoted a stanza from the traditional folk song, “If you’d have sung that song as many times as I did—you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.”

Dylan went on to quote lines from Big Bill Broonzy’s blues hit “Key to the Highway” that he said begat his own “Highway 61,” thrilling music aficionados.

He said he’d sung so many folk songs that began with a variation of “come all ye” that it began to bleed into his own songs, including “Come gather ‘round people/wherever you roam” from “The Times They Are A-Changing.”

“You’d have written them too,” he insisted.

“There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously. All these songs are connected,” he said.

“Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary. Some got angered, others loved them.”

For all of his appreciation for his predecessors and colleagues, Dylan took a few amusing swipes at some who he said didn’t like or get his songs. This included, strangely, country star Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall, a vanilla country songwriter responsible for the 1968 pop hit “Harper Valley PTA.”

Then Dylan set off on a lyrical riff that just begs for a song of its own: “Tom loves little baby ducks, slow moving trains and rain. He loves old pickup trains and little country streams. Sleeping without dreams. Bourbon in a glass. Coffee in a cup. Tomatoes on the vine, and onions.”

His individual targets may have seemed random, but his ire was focused squarely on the Nashville music establishment of the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond). His comments channeled decades of tension between Nashville’s record industry executives and radio DJs, and renegade artists like Nelson, Cash and Dylan—who for years felt shut out from all important country radio play.

Dylan recalled listening to a Hall song on the radio while he was in Nashville recording an album.

“He was talking about all the things he loves—an everyman kind of song, trying to connect with people,” Dylan said. “Trying to make you think he’s just like you and you’re just like him. We all love the same things and we’re all in this together,” he said, tongue firmly in cheek.

The bard’s harshest rebukes were reserved for the press.

“Critics have always been on my tail since day one. Seems like they’ve always given me special treatment. Some of the music critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t these same critics say similar things about Tom Waits? They say my voice is shot. That I have no voice.

Why don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free? What have I done to deserve this special treatment? Why me, Lord?

“Talk about slurred words and no diction. Why don’t they say those same things about them?”

“Why me, Lord?” Dylan said. It’s a refrain he would repeat, chorus-like, several times throughout the speech—a subtle nod to Kris Kristofferson, who wrote a song of the same name.

At the close of his speech, Dylan lavishly thanked Musicares and talked about how the worthy organization had come to his friend Billy Lee Riley’s aid when the rockabilly pioneer died impoverished five years ago. He suggested in no uncertain terms that Riley was well-deserving of the honor, even posthumously.

“He did it with style and grace,” Dylan said. “You won’t find him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s not there. Metallica is. Abba is. Mamas and the Papas—I know they’re in there. Jefferson Airplane, Alice Cooper, Steely Dan—I’ve got nothing against them. Soft rock, hard rock, psychedelic pop. I got nothing against any of that stuff, but after all, it is called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Billy Lee Riley is not there,” Dylan said. “Yet.”

The last time Dylan publicly suggested a course of action, Farm Aid was born.

In the years ahead, maybe even the months, look for Riley to find his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When Bob Dylan talks, the world listens.

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With Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan bid an angry, ragged farewell to his wife

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Bob Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks,” which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboards album charts beginning on March 1, 1975.

Despite the common perception, Blood On The Tracks is not an album about divorce. It’s easy to confuse it for one because Dylan eventually did call it quits on his marriage, but that came years later. Blood On The Tracks is actually a lot more like a temper tantrum mixed with a pity party. It’s an album about the withering thrills of early romance, and it lashes out against it. As the children of the ’60s grew into adulthood and the cold realities of life piled up, the voice of that generation was once again echoing back to them what they already felt. Blood On The Tracks is what happens when hope and optimism turn to pain and confusion.

Bob Dylan first met his future wife Sara Lownds sometime in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband, the photographer Hans Lownds, and while Dylan was still romantically linked to fellow folk singer Joan Baez. The ethereal Sara was working for Time Life and was an old friend of Sally Buchler, the reclining model in red featured on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home who would go on to marry Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. There was an immediate chemistry between Lownds and Dylan, and within a year or so of their initial encounter, they’d both ditched their significant others and had taken up with one another. After a very low-key 18-month courtship, the duo tied the knot on November 22, 1965, while she was pregnant with their first child, Jesse.

One of the seminal moments of Dylan’s artistic narrative came shortly after the nuptials on July 29, 1966 when he crashed his Triumph Tiger motorcycle riding around his home in Woodstock, New York. Almost overnight, the paragon of social justice, the voice of generation, went silent. Around the world, people speculated on the nature and the degree of his injuries, wondering when or even if he’d ever be able to recover. Of course, as history proved, the accident was nothing more than an albatross; an excuse to draw back from the impossible pressures that his audience exerted on him. The public continuously clamored for him to become more than he ever wanted to be himself.
As he wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, “I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everyone and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”

For roughly the next seven years, Dylan, at the height of his cultural import, traded in his rock-star status to become a better husband and father. Rather than becoming a recluse, he recorded and released six albums in that span—to decreasing critical acclaim—in addition to his work with the Band on the renowned Basement Tapes. But outside of one-off gigs like The Johnny Cash Show in 1969 or the Concert For Bangladesh in 1971, he kept close to home.

In 1973 and after many years, Dylan ditched his longtime label Columbia and signed a new deal with the emerging David Geffen-headed Asylum Records. Shortly thereafter he reunited with the Band, recorded the album Planet Waves, and embarked on a massive, 40-date North America “comeback” tour that kicked off on January 3, 1974 in Chicago. From a commercial standpoint, the outing was a gigantic success, but Dylan remained unhappy. Planet Waves flopped and when he returned home, his relationship with his wife grew increasingly distant until they became completely estranged.

Oddly, a lot of the tension stemmed from a home remodeling project. In 1973, the Dylans packed up and moved to Point Dume, California. Initially, Sara wanted to add an additional bedroom onto their new home. From that small idea the project grew increasingly large and more elaborate, growing to include a new fireplace, rippling out on an almost weekly basis. The couple that had hardly ever argued about anything were now in each other’s faces about everything. Bob then took off for the road, his eye began to wander, and pretty soon, his marital vows went out the window and he began cheating on Sara with a record executive named Ellen Bernstein.

By the summer of 1974, Dylan’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. He started drinking and smoking again and Sara had had enough. The husband and wife decided to go their separate ways, and Bob settled down in a farmhouse back in his home state of Minnesota. A short while later he called up his mentor John Hammond and told him that he planned to record a number of “private songs” come the fall.
On September 16, 1974, Dylan entered Studio A at A&R Studios in New York and got on with it. It was the same room he’d worked on so many of his classic records in, and as he began work on what would turn into his next album, he returned to the studio in hopes of recapturing those heralded sounds. Acclaimed engineer Phil Ramone, who bought the space from Columbia in 1968, was enlisted to man the boards, and brought along his assistant Glenn Berger to lend a hand.

For the backing band, “Phil chose Eric Weissberg, banjo and guitar player extraordinaire, and his ‘Deliverance Band,’ a bunch of top session players,” Berger later explained. “I set up for drums, bass, guitars, and keyboard. I placed Dylan’s mics in the middle of the room. In the midst of the hubbub, Dylan skulked in. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.”

For five days, Dylan hunkered down in that vaunted studio and let loose on tape with thoughts and ideas that often only made sense to him. He wasn’t striving for musical perfection. Drunk as he often was on wine, brevity became the watchword of the sessions in general. He eschewed going back and correcting obvious mistakes and often wouldn’t even pay attention as Ramone hit him with the playbacks. Most of the time, he failed to even clue the band in on the chord structures of the songs before the red light flashed on. “It was weird. You couldn’t really watch his fingers ’cause he was playing in a tuning arrangement I had never seen before,” Weissberg remembered. “If it was anybody else I would have walked out. He put us at a real disadvantage. If it hadn’t been that we liked the songs and it was Bob, it would have been a drag. His talent overcomes a lot of stuff.”

With 12 tracks completed and in the can, Dylan went back to Minnesota. The record company penciled in a Christmas Day release and began making test pressing when he suddenly experienced a change of heart. After listening to the tapes with his brother David, Dylan paused. In the liner notes to his Biograph collection, Dylan wrote, “I had the acetate. I hadn’t listened to it for a couple of months. The record still hadn’t come out, and I put it on. I just didn’t… I thought the songs could have sounded differently, better. So I went in and re-recorded them.”

Just two days after Christmas, Dylan convened with a number of local session musicians at Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis and re-recorded five of the albums 10 tracks, including its emotional core, “Idiot Wind.” A little over three weeks later, on January 20, 1975, Blood On The Tracks was finally released. Two months later it hit No. 1 on the Billboard album charts.

1975 really was a weird, transitional time for America. The last troops were just being pulled out of Vietnam and the nation was still reeling from the embarrassment of the Watergate scandal. The hippie generation that had grown up in the ’60s had long lost their innocence and many had lost their way entirely. Unwittingly, Dylan had created a record that perfectly conformed to the mood of the moment. It was one whose themes and attitude dovetailed with so many of the feelings that his most ardent fans and casual supporters were experiencing in their own lives. They still nodded their head in unison with the music, but now it was with resignation rather than youthful determination.

The initial reception to the record by the critical elite was mixed. Jon Landau writing for Rolling Stone at the time allowed that “in returning to his role as disturber of the peace, Dylan hasn’t revived any specific phase from the past, only a style that lets his emotions speak more freely and the state of mind in which he no longer denies the fires that are still raging within him and us. But also knocked the album for its overall sound. “The record itself has been made with typical shoddiness. The accompanying musicians have never sounded more indifferent. The sound is generally no more than what Greil Marcus calls ‘functional,’ a neutral environment from which Dylan emerges.”

While the critics argued about what the album meant as an expression of Dylan the artist, the record-buying public understood that Blood On The Tracks meant more as an expression of the Dylan the man. While the specific messages within the record remained opaque, songs like “You’re A Big Girl Now,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” and “Shelter From The Storm” spelled out in a pretty obvious way that Dylan had an intended audience, or alternatively, an intended target in mind for this music. Jakob Dylan would in later years describe Blood On The Tracks sounding like “his parents talking.”

The album ultimately sparked a new career renaissance for Dylan. Later that year he wrote one of his most celebrated songs “Hurricane” about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was sent to prison under dubious conditions thought to be motivated by racism. The next year he would release that song on the record Desire that would also hit No. 1 on the charts and achieve double-platinum status. That album closed out with the track “Sara” where—in direct conflict with his feelings on Blood On The Tracks—Dylan tried to woo back his wife. It worked and it didn’t. The couple reconciled for a time, but eventually, Sara filed for divorce on March 1, 1977. The matter was settled by June 30 with a settlement rumored to number $36 million.

In later years, Dylan, a man who sometimes considers facts flexible, vehemently battled against even the slightest insinuation that Blood On The Tracks was in any way autobiographical. In an interview with Cameron Crowe a decade after the album’s release, Dylan said, “I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks these interpreters sometimes are… I don’t write confessional songs.”

In another interview with Bill Flanagan that same year, he was just as dismissive, saying, “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind’… I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn’t... I didn’t feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same thing, I don’t know.”

When pressed, Dylan eventually conceded that the album was at least a little bit about his personal life, “Yeah. [It’s] somewhat about that. But I’m not going to make an album and lean on a marriage relationship. There’s no way I would do that, any more than I would write an album about some lawyers’ battles that I had. There are certain subjects that don’t interest me to exploit. And I wouldn’t really exploit a relationship with somebody.”

No matter how vigorously he’d like to claim otherwise, that’s exactly what Dylan did, and it’s one of the reasons why Blood On The Tracks ranks among his greatest works. Dylan is an artist who, nearly to the point of self-sabotage, follows his muse. Throughout his entire career he has blindly followed those intrinsic internal urges and allowed them to shape his music and move his pen. His best art comes when those urges overlap with his own thoughts and feelings, or alternatively square with the mood of the times. With Blood On The Tracks, they did both.

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Seven Questions for Bob Dylan

How do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?*

You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his way from the bus to the stage. If you play at one of the arenas where he plays—if, like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, you're a fellow musician, sharing a bill—then you have a decision to make, occasioned by the privilege and problem of proximity. You'll be standing around and suddenly there he'll be, and you have to figure out if you're allowed—if you allow yourself—to behold Bob Dylan.

* We asked Mr. Dylan's representatives what he eats for breakfast. Their response: "Next question."

Tweedy didn't think he was when he was traveling last summer on Dylan's Americanarama tour. "First or second show of the tour, I was standing out in the middle of the dressing-room area—you know, a bunch of trailers in a U-shape. The show was about to start for Dylan, and he came through with his dressed-to-the-nines gang. He saw me, and I figured I was just supposed to avert my eyes, because I didn't think I was supposed to be where I was, standing in the way."

Tweedy was about to stare at the ground when he heard Dylan say, "Hey, Jeff, how's it going, man?"

That's all he said and all he had to say. "It was the biggest thrill of my life," Tweedy says. "I was like, I hope people saw that—that it was real."

How do you sleep at night, Bob Dylan, How do you sleep at night? The morning sun's so bright, Bob Dylan, Your band is still so tight, Bob Dylan. So how do you sleep at night?**

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither. He has been giving interviews—albeit contentious ones—for as long as he's been making music, and he's been making music for more than fifty years. He's seventy-two years old. He's written one volume of an autobiography and is under contract to write two more. He's hosted his own radio show. He exhibits his paintings and his sculpture in galleries and museums around the world. Ten years ago, he cowrote and starred in a movie, Masked and Anonymous, that was about his own masked anonymity. He is reportedly working on another studio recording, his thirty-sixth, and year after year and night after night he still gets on stage to sing songs unequaled in both their candor and circumspection. Though famous as a man who won't talk, Dylan is and always has been a man who won't shut up.

** We asked Mr. Dylan's management about Dylan's sleeping habits. The response: "Next question."

And yet he has not given in; he has preserved his mystery as assiduously as he has curated his myth, and even after a lifetime of compulsive disclosure he stands apart not just from his audience but also from those who know and love him. He is his own inner circle, a spotlit Salinger who has remained singular and inviolate while at the same time remaining in plain sight.

It's quite a trick. Dylan's public career began at the dawn of the age of total disclosure and has continued into the dawn of the age of total surveillance; he has ended up protecting his privacy at a time when privacy itself is up for grabs. But his claim to privacy is compelling precisely because it's no less enigmatic and paradoxical than any other claim he's made over the years. Yes, it's important to him—"of the utmost importance, of paramount importance," says his friend Ronee Blakley, the Nashville star who sang with Dylan on his Rolling Thunder tour. And yes, the importance of his privacy is the one lesson he has deigned to teach, to the extent that his friends Robbie Robertson and T Bone Burnett have absorbed it into their own lives. "They both have learned from him," says Jonathan Taplin, who was the Band's road manager and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. "They've learned how to keep private, and they lead very private lives. That's the school of Bob Dylan—the smart guys who work with him learn from him. Robbie's very private. And T Bone is so private, he changes his e-mail address every three or four weeks."
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How does Dylan do it? How does he impress upon those around him the need to protect his privacy? He doesn't. They just do. That's what makes his privacy Dylanesque. It's not simply a matter of Dylan being private; it's a matter of Dylan's privacy being private—of his manager saying, when you call, "Oh, you're the guy writing about Bob Dylan's privacy. How can I not help you?"

Hey, do you eat meat, Bob Dylan, Will you eat some meat? You're on the Mercy Seat, Bob Dylan. You're selling "The Complete Bob Dylan," Pledged to your own defeat, Bob Dylan, So will you eat some meat?***

It's because of us, of course—because of us that he practices privacy as an art, because of us that he abjures politics, because of us that he retreats from us, because of us that he no longer talks to us from the stage. "What the hell is there to say?" he has asked, adding that no matter what he says, we would want him to say more. We would want him to lead us. We would want him to tell us the meanings of his songs. We would want him to play his songs the same way every night, the same way he played them on his records. We would want him to join our causes. We would want him to deliver prophecies. We would want him to tell us about his family, and if he didn't answer, we'd reserve the right to go through his garbage cans.

*** We asked if Dylan is a vegetarian. The response: "Next question."

"I've always been appalled by people who come up to celebrities while they're eating," says Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer who has taken pictures of Dylan, Springsteen, and just about every other god of the rock era. "But with Dylan, it's at an entirely different level. With everybody else, it's 'We love you, we love your work.' With Dylan, it's 'How does it feel to be God?' It's 'I named my firstborn after you.' In some ways, the life he lives is not the life he's chosen. In some ways, the life he leads has been forced upon him because of the way the public looks upon him to be."

That's the narrative, anyway—Dylan as eternal victim, Dylan as the measure of our sins. There is another narrative, however, and it's that Dylan is not just the first and greatest intentional rock 'n' roll poet. He's also the first great rock 'n' roll asshole. The poet expanded the notion of what it was possible for a song to express; the asshole shrunk the notion of what it was possible for the audience to express in response to a song. The poet expanded what it meant to be human; the asshole noted every human failing, keeping a ledger of debts never to be forgotten or forgiven. As surely as he rewrote the songbook, Dylan rewrote the relationship between performer and audience; his signature is what separates him from all his presumed peers in the rock business and all those who have followed his example. "I never was a performer who wanted to be one of them, part of the crowd," he said, and in that sentence surely lies one of his most enduring achievements: the transformation of the crowd into an all-consuming but utterly unknowing them.

"We played with McCartney at Bonnaroo, and the thing about McCartney is that he wants to be loved so much," Jeff Tweedy says. "He has so much energy, he gives and gives and gives, he plays three hours, and he plays every song you want to hear. Dylan has zero fucks to give about that. And it's truly inspiring. The joke on our tour was that his T-shirt should say PISSING PEOPLE OFF SINCE 1962. If you dropped people out of a vacuum from another planet and planted them in a field somewhere so that they could study us, and there's a guy half-decipherably singing jump-blues songs almost in the dark, and there's people watching him—well, it wouldn't make any sense… ."

It makes sense only in the terms that Dylan has established for himself: His life and his art have combined to create the oral and written parts of a continual test that most of us fail. The only way to pass is to go to the shows, for as Dylan told Rolling Stone a few years ago, "The only fans I know I have are the people who I'm looking at when I play night after night." He's notorious for creative disruption—for rendering the old chestnuts unrecognizable—but as he's gotten older, so have his fans, and the test has grown more rigorous still. He's not only "chosen not to deliver the set that his old fans would like to hear," as one of his longtime promoters, John Scher, says. "He's chosen to play in a stand-up situation, which is not a situation that his older fans enjoy." That is, when booking his tour, his agent prefers that the shows are to be general admission, with no seating. That is, he makes the geezers stand, as if to say, in Scher's words, "If you can't stand up, you shouldn't be there."

It is not that Dylan is necessarily more private than McCartney or Van Morrison or Neil Young or Bono—we know as little of their lives as we do of his. It is that Dylan has perfected the dynamic that makes his privacy simultaneously possible and intolerable: The poet needs the asshole. The asshole needs the audience. And when you go to a Dylan show, both the poet and the asshole have you right where they want you.

How do you get your mail Bob Dylan, How do you get your mail? You've put yourself in jail, Bob Dylan, Are you still chasing tail, Bob Dylan? That's been your third rail, Bob Dylan, So how do you get your mail?****

Here is a Dylan story, featuring neither poet nor asshole. Tweedy heard it from his bass player. His bass player heard it from a girl he knows. The girl lived it. She was walking down the street in Memphis, Tweedy thinks it was. "She looked into the basement windows of a hotel, and she saw Bob Dylan swimming in the pool with his bodyguard. She decided, 'Let's go see what happens if I say hi.' She walked into this hotel, and she walked over to the pool and said hi, and he took pictures with her. She said that she was a big fan and he said, 'How many times have you come to see me?' She said, 'Twenty-five.' And he said, 'Oh, man, how can you take it?' "

**** We asked if Dylan uses e-mail. His representatives would only say that he might. Or might not.
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There are a lot of stories like this—Dylan with the carapace of celebrity removed; Dylan like a girl, pretty and lonely, finally asked out by a suitor uncowed; Dylan the shy midwesterner; Dylan taking extra time to sign autographs, hesitating

only when someone asks him to sign vintage vinyl, because he knows he's being used; Dylan posing with the daughter of a father who's waited by the wings of the stage; Dylan dutifully and graciously going about the business of fame; Dylan gratified to be finally treated as another human being. There are enough of these stories to prompt the question: Is being treated as just another human being all that Dylan wants?

The answer is probably no, for Dylan is also known for staring straight ahead, stone-faced as a judge, when people approach him, until they go away.

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go. For instance, last summer Wilco and My Morning Jacket went on tour with him. Both were led to believe that they'd be playing with him, but only Jim James of My Morning Jacket expected to hang out with him and, like, jam. The result, though predictable, played out like a metaphor for the vagaries of salvation: Jim James, with his expectations, had his expectations dashed; Jeff Tweedy, with his resignation, came home with stories to tell, such as the time, waiting in the wings, when Tweedy told Dylan that Mavis Staples said hello. Tweedy had produced Staples; Dylan had been friends with her since the Greenwich Village days, so he responded with one of those utterances he specializes in, gnomic and innocent, with the same surprising spin as the lines of his songs:

"Man, tell Mavis she should have married me!"

The question of who Dylan will or won't speak to is one of the animating questions of his public life; and neither friendship nor eminence have anything to do with the answer. He is rumored not to have spoken to his pal Willie Nelson on a recent tour, and Ron Delsener, who's been promoting Dylan for decades, says that when he arranged a Dylan–Van Morrison tour through the UK in 1998, he eventually had to approach Dylan's road manager with a plea: "He's got to talk to Van." Hell, when Dylan accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, he wore shades and barely stuck around for the postceremony reception.

There is not a person in the world who is not at his feet, and that his humanity exists as the last beating heart inside the last inner circle of celebrity is what makes his humanity perishable and perhaps beside the point. It's the question people have been asking for centuries: How human does the king want to be? More specifically, how human does the king permit himself to be? It's not hard to find out: All you have to do is ask him the same questions you'd ask any other human being, and you'll get your answers soon enough.

How do you do the deed, Bob Dylan, How do you do the deed? You're a walking centipede, Bob Dylan, Oblivious to need, Bob Dylan. You're as old as Harry Reid, Bob Dylan! So how do you do the deed?*****

What do we want from Bob Dylan that he hasn't given us already? The answer is axiomatic: We want that which he won't give. "The list of stupid questions you can ask Bob Dylan is endless," says John Scher, and, of course, the most stupid is the one question he has never answered: How does he live? The things we can find out about almost anyone in the world, including the president, are precisely the things we can't find out about Dylan. Does Dylan use e-mail? Does he have a smartphone? Does he eat meat? Does he sleep through the night? Is he kind? "Oh, my God, this is Bob Dylan you're talking about," says someone who knows him well. "How can you ask these questions?"

***** We declined to ask about Dylan's romantic life.

So this is what we know about how he lives. He has homes all over the world, one of which, a manor he owns with his brother in Scotland, is for rent. He lives primarily in Malibu, on a promontory leaning into the Pacific called Point Dume. He has a lot of land surrounded by a corrugated-metal fence, with a horse ring for relaxation and a guardhouse for vigilance. There are junked cars and large commercial shipping containers parked out front as a sort of intentional eyesore, an impediment to prying eyes. He has six children and ten grandchildren, and is said to be very proud of them. He's in shape; he likes to swim and box when he's on the road, and so do members of his band. He's a dog guy. He wears hooded sweatshirts and either combat boots or running shoes. He wore a wig for Masked and Anonymous and kept wearing it when filming was over, at least for a time. Though there are rarely any Dylan sightings, he is not unreachable. When Ron Maxwell, the director of Gods and Generals, got it into his head to ask Dylan for an original song, his music coordinator laughed at him. But when he asked, he got a reply from Dylan's management right away, and both Maxwell and his wife wound up listening to "Cross the Green Mountain" with Dylan and his band at a studio in the Valley. "He was there in his New Balance shoes," Maxwell says. "He was a bit shy, I want to say. We said hi and shook hands. When they played the song back, he was looking away. I heard the whole thing, taking notes. At first I was thinking, 'That's a lot of verses.' Then it was finished, and I stood up and he looked at me. I said, 'I really like it.' He said, 'You do? You like it?' I said, 'I more than like it—are you kidding?' And he relaxed and all the band members relaxed. The tension left the room. They let me know they were all fans of [Maxwell's first Civil War movie] Gettysburg and watched it over and over again on the bus."

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He spends a lot of time on the bus for a string of engagements dubbed the "Never-Ending Tour" by the press but called a variety of names by Dylan, one of which is the "Why Do You Look at Me So Strangely Tour?" He rides in a star coach; his band rides in a tour bus; they stay on the ground floors of chain motels, where Dylan can smoke; they use the pool; Dylan doesn't eat where members of his or other bands eat; he doesn't use the dressing rooms; he goes surprisingly light on security, but his security detail is bracingly efficient getting him to and from the bus, as his bus driver is bracingly efficient getting him close to the doors.

His life is often portrayed as an allergic reaction to fame; but he is a creature of fame no less than he's a creature of music and art. Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left. The best answer came from Arthur Rosato, his production manager in the mid-seventies and early eighties: "He lives his own life, and that's it. You deal with what's in front of you with him and that's it. He's his own person. He has opinions, but he's not opinionated. He's open, but he doesn't broadcast a lot of stuff. I've had issues, and when you confront him, he listens. He's a different kind of person, because you could say whatever you want to him. He's pretty much one-on-one. In group things, he'll slip into the background. No matter who the people are, he's the same, and he's very attentive to them. That's how he gets along."

That's also how he keeps his privacy without having to talk about it. He knows that the people around him are loyal, and they know that if they weren't loyal, they wouldn't be around him. They not only know not to talk; they also wouldn't think of talking. They listen, then issue their gentlemanly demurrals; when a potential source called Dylan headquarters to ask if he should comment for this story, he was not told no, but rather asked, "What do you think you should do?" It's an honor system, left to the participants to uphold, even when the participants are far from the inner circle. "I didn't get any sense of how he lives," Tweedy says, "and the sense I did get … Well, anything that I did learn, I almost feel like I'm betraying him to share."

It's also a system of omertà, enforced by the threat of expulsion. Those who say that Bob Dylan has never ordered them not to speak also say that if they did speak, they would never be able to work for him again. A member of a band that once opened for Dylan recently published a piece recounting how a friend of Dylan's was banished from the tour for revealing that Dylan had caught a cold; in a recent interview, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos fretted that Dylan hadn't called him since Hidalgo had revealed that he had been in the studio with Dylan, working on a new album. Dylan doesn't say anything because he doesn't have to say anything; he communicates his expectations concerning his privacy in the same way that he communicated to Jim James and Jeff Tweedy how he wanted them to come onstage and play the cover of "The Weight," which he played in the final shows of the Americanarama tour. "We played that song in a different key every night," Tweedy says. "It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, 'It's in A flat tonight.' Or we'd already be out onstage, and we'd talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he'd say, 'A flat.' And that's in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out."

What kind of car do you drive, Bob Dylan, What kind of car do you drive? You're good at staying alive, Bob Dylan. But the bee dies in the hive, Bob Dylan. So what kind of car do you drive?******

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around. He had to become Bob Dylan, after all, and the ceaseless force of that becoming has been what has given life to his music for as long as he's been making it. Who else is like Bob Dylan? Any human being growing old finds himself in a depopulated world, but Dylan's world was depopulated to begin with—he has remarked that when he was growing up, he felt like he'd been born in the wrong place, to "the wrong parents." The people who know him say they like him, and that he laughs and cries like any other man. But they never say that he's like any other man. And so his community is a community of saints: He loved George Harrison; of course he did—George was a Beatle. George stayed in Dylan's house when George went to L. A. to get experimental treatment for his cancer; but then George died. Dylan also loved Jerry Garcia. And when Jerry died, an addict rather than a seer, Dylan went to the funeral and on his way out told Jerry's advisor, John Scher, "That man back there is the only one who knew what it's like to be me."

****** We asked what car Dylan drives. The response: "Next question."
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There is nothing about his life that has not been foretold in his songs. He is an old man now; believing, he says, in "a God of time and space," he sings almost exclusively of memory and loss. Oh, sure, he might be singing about the Duquesne whistle in one song and about a woman named Nettie Moore in another, but those are all just MacGuffins—they all just allow him to sing about his own comic persistence and the fulfillment of his own strange fate.

Who's that on the bus, Bob Dylan, Who's that on the bus? It sure ain't one of us, Bob Dylan. You've never had no trust, Bob Dylan. Your sleep never rusts, Bob Dylan. You'll never slake our lusts, Bob Dylan. But who's gonna carve your bust, Bob Dylan, If not one of us?*******

A few years ago, he was picked up by the police in Long Branch, New Jersey, for the crime of walking in the rain, dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, and peering into the window of a home for sale in a dodgy neighborhood. The news was greeted with a lot of predictable headlines—NO DIRECTION HOME, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, etc. But here's the obvious question, asked by a friend of his: "Do you really think that's the first time that he's done that? He does a lot of walking no one would expect. He'll walk through neighborhoods undetected and talk to people on their front porches. It's the only freedom Bob Dylan has—the freedom to move around mysteriously."

******* This is a rhetorical question.

People say that a lot about Dylan: His privacy is all he has. It's an odd thing to say. It assumes he's powerless and needs to be protected. But Bob Dylan has never been powerless. Even when his songs stood up for the powerless, he was always pioneering new ways to use the power of his fame, of which the two-way mirror of his privacy is the ultimate expression. Yes, it's cool when Ron Delsener says, "I've seen Dylan walk down Seventh Avenue in a cowboy hat and nobody recognize him. I've seen him eat at a diner and nobody come over to him"—it makes you think that Dylan is out among us, invisible now, with no secrets to conceal, and that at any time we might turn around and see him. But we never do; nobody ever does, even where he lives. What a woman who works the tunnel between the buses and the backstage area at an arena outside of Atlanta remembers about Dylan is not that she saw him; what she remembers is "I was not allowed to look at him."

He was, of course, on his way to the stage when he passed her averted eyes—on his way to be looked at and listened to. It sounds like a paradox typical of Bob Dylan, worthy of Bob Dylan, but it's really pretty straightforward as an exercise of star power. The crossed relationship between Bob Dylan and his audience is the most enduring one in all of rock 'n' roll, and it keeps going—and will keep going to the last breath—because from the start he laid down a simple and impossible rule:

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Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night review – an unalloyed pleasure

It’s Bob Dylan’s turn to take on the great American songbook – and he manages to make it utterly his own

It’s obviously up against some stiff competition from lingerie adverts and festive albums that came with free Christmas cards, but there’s an argument that Shadows in the Night may be the most improbable moment yet in Bob Dylan’s latterday career. By releasing a collection of standards from the great American songbook, Dylan, presumably inadvertently, joins in a trend begun 14 years ago by Robbie Williams. Ever since Williams proved that you could sell 7m copies of Swing When You’re Winning to an audience who’d never previously evinced much interest in the work of Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer, the great American songbook album has become a kind of sine qua non among rock stars of a certain vintage. They’ve all been at it, from Paul McCartney to Carly Simon to Linda Ronstadt. Rod Stewart seemed to treat the whole business less like a canny career move than a terrible endurance test to inflict on the general public. By the time he released his fifth great American songbook collection, you got the feeling that even the most indefatigable fan of the jazzy standard was on the floor tearfully pleading for mercy, and in danger of developing a nervous twitch brought on by the opening chords of Mack the Knife.

However, Dylan has latterly made a career out of doing the exact opposite of what most of his peers do. They dutifully tour their big hits, or perform classic albums in order; he takes to the stage and either brilliantly reinterprets his back catalogue or wilfully mangles it beyond repair, depending on whether you’re the kind of critic who gets whole paragraphs out of a change of syllabic emphasis in the lyrics of All Along the Watchtower or an audience member who’s heard three-quarters of Like a Rolling Stone without realising it’s Like a Rolling Stone. They make albums that cravenly attempt to conjure up the atmosphere of their best-loved classic works; he makes albums that conjure up a world before Bob Dylan existed – filled with music that sounds like blues or rockabilly or country from an age when pop was as yet untouched by his influence.

The latter is one of the reasons that Shadows in the Night works. Most great American songbook albums feel grafted on to the artist’s career: too obviously glommed together as a money-making exercise or a means of tiding them over when inspiration fails to strike. By contrast, Shadows in the Night sounds entirely of a piece with the albums Dylan has been making for the last decade and a half. Performed by his current touring band and produced by Dylan himself – rather more beautifully than you might expect, given his reputation for bashing everything out in the studio as quickly as possible – it glides languidly along on bowed double bass and waves of pedal steel, occasionally gently supported by pillowy, muted brass. The playing is full of lovely, subtle touches: the guitar line that shivers in the background of Autumn Leaves’ opening lines; the moment three minutes into I’m a Fool to Want You when the music momentarily loses its rhythmic pulse as Dylan sings “I can’t get along without you”, as if it’s on the verge of collapse. If the album in its entirety sounds more monotone in pace than its immediate predecessors – Dylan’s drummer is frequently relegated to occasionally tapping a hi-hat, or banished from the studio entirely – any of its tracks could have been slipped on to Modern Times or Tempest without provoking puzzlement among listeners.

Certainly, the album fits perfectly with what you might call Dylan’s latterday persona, the grizzled old geezer unveiled on 1997’s Time Out of Mind, either sentimental or growling at the world to get off his lawn; “trying to get to heaven,” as the song of the same name put it, “before they close the door”. Whether that’s a part Dylan is playing or an accurate representation of what he’s like in his 70s is a moot point, but the songs on Shadows in the Night have been chosen – usually from less well-thumbed chapters of the great American songbook – to suit the character. Their lyrical tone is usually remorseful and lovelorn – The Night We Called It a Day, What’ll I Do, Full Moon and Empty Arms – and even when it isn’t, it ends up sounding that way because of Dylan’s delivery. His version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening takes a song about a burgeoning romance and ferrets out the misery buried in the lyrics. “Fly to her side and make her your own / Or all through your life you may dream all alone,” he sings, but there’s a rueful quality to his voice that undercuts the carpe diem sentiment and a song cautioning the listener not to miss their chances suddenly becomes a song about missed chances.

A lot has been written about the state of Dylan’s voice in recent years, but if any songs suit a ruined voice, they’re those assembled here. Most of their authors were half Dylan’s age when they wrote them, but they sounded much older: everything is suffused with world-weariness and regret. The irony is that Dylan’s vocals on Shadows in the Night sound “better” in the conventional sense than they have in years, presumably because he’s singing softly – crooning, if you will. There’s certainly nothing here that resembles the opening of Tempest’s Pay in Blood, where a combination of rage and whatever havoc has been visited on his larynx over the years left him sounding like the frontman of Autopsy or Disembowelment, and what came out wasn’t words but a terrifying, incomprehensible growl. Still, such things are relative. His voice is still cracked and catarrhal and occasionally ventures wildly off pitch, usually when he tries to hold the songs’ long, dramatic, final notes. It doesn’t matter: it fits, as if the hard-won experience of the lyrics has been etched on his throat.

Dylanologists could doubtless tell you a lot about the relationship between the songs here and his own oeuvre: you suspect they’ll have a field day with the religious overtones of Stay With Me. To say that all seems besides the point isn’t to rubbish their close reading and study, which at its best is genuinely illuminating. It’s merely to suggest that Shadows in the Night works as an unalloyed pleasure, rather than a research project. It may be the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Dylan’s made since Time Out of Mind. He’s an unlikely candidate to join the serried ranks of rock stars tackling standards: appropriately enough, given that Frank Sinatra sang all these songs before him, he does it his way, and to dazzling effect.

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Bob Dylan American musician

Bob Dylan, original name Robert Allen Zimmerman   (born May 24, 1941, Duluth,Minnesota, U.S.), American folksinger who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry. Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan sold tens of millions of albums, wrote more than 500 songs recorded by more than 2,000 artists, performed all over the world, and set the standard for lyric writing. (See Editor’s Note: About the author.)

He grew up in the northeastern Minnesota mining town of Hibbing, where his father co-owned Zimmerman Furniture and Appliance Co. Taken with the music of Hank Williams, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Ray, he acquired his first guitar in 1955 at age 14 and later, as a high school student, played in a series of rock and roll bands. In 1959, just before enrolling at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he served a brief stint playing piano for rising pop star Bobby Vee. While attending college, he discovered the bohemian section of Minneapolis known as Dinkytown. Fascinated by Beat poetry and folksinger Woody Guthrie, he began performing folk music in coffeehouses, adopting the last name Dylan (after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas). Restless and determined to meet Guthrie—who was confined to a hospital in New Jersey—he relocated to the East Coast.

Arriving in late January 1961, Dylan was greeted by a typically merciless New York City winter. A survivor at heart, he relied on the generosity of various benefactors who, charmed by his performances at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, provided meals and shelter. He quickly built a cult following and within four months was hired to play harmonica for a Harry Belafonte recording session. Responding to Robert Shelton’s laudatory New York Times review of one of Dylan’s live shows in September 1961, talent scout–producer John Hammond investigated and signed him to Columbia Records. There Dylan’s unkempt appearance and roots-oriented song material earned him the whispered nickname “Hammond’s Folly.”

Dylan’s eponymous first album was released in March 1962 to mixed reviews. His singing voice—a cowboy lament laced with Midwestern patois, with an obvious nod to Guthrie—confounded many critics. It was a sound that took some getting used to. By comparison, Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (released in May 1963), sounded a clarion call. Young ears everywhere quickly assimilated his quirky voice, which divided parents and children and established him as part of the burgeoning counterculture, “a rebel with a cause.” Moreover, his first major composition, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” served notice that this was no cookie-cutter recording artist. About this time, Dylan signed a seven-year management contract with Albert Grossman, who soon replaced Hammond with another Columbia producer, Tom Wilson.

In April 1963 Dylan played his first major New York City concert, at Town Hall. In May, when he was forbidden to perform “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” on Ed Sullivan’s popular television program, he literally walked out on a golden opportunity. That summer, championed by folk music’s doyenne,Joan Baez, Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival and was virtually crowned the king of folk music. The prophetic title song of his next album, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), provided an instant anthem.

Millions jumped on the bandwagon when the mainstream folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary reached number two on the Billboard pop singles chart in mid-1963 with their version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan was perceived as a singer of protest songs, a politically charged artist with a whole other agenda. (Unlike Elvis Presley, there would be no film of Dylan singing “Rock-a-Hula Baby” surrounded by bikini-clad women.) Dylan spawned imitators at coffeehouses and record labels everywhere. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, while previewing songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan, he confounded his core audience by performing songs of a personal nature rather than his signature protest repertoire. Although his new lyrics were as challenging as his earlier compositions, a backlash from purist folk fans began and continued for three years as Dylan defied convention at every turn.

On his next album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), electric instruments were openly brandished—a violation of folk dogma—and only two protest songs were included. The folk rock group the Byrds covered “Mr. Tambourine Man” from that album, adding electric 12-string guitar and three-part harmony vocals, and took it to number one on the singles chart. Other rock artists were soon pilfering the Dylan songbook and joining the juggernaut. As Dylan’s mainstream audience increased rapidly, his purist folk fans fell off in droves. The maelstrom that engulfed Dylan is captured in Don’t Look Back(1967), the telling documentary of his 1965 tour of Britain, directed by D.A. Pennebaker.

In June 1965, consorting with “hardened” rock musicians and in kinship with the Byrds, Dylan recorded his most ascendant song yet, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Devoid of obvious protest references, set against a rough-hewn, twangy rock underpinning, and fronted by a snarling vocal that lashed out at all those who questioned his legitimacy, “Like a Rolling Stone” spoke to yet a new set of listeners and reached number two on theBillboard chart. It was the final link in the chain. The world fell at Dylan’s feet. And the album containing the hit single, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), further vindicated his abdication of the protest throne.

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan bravely showcased his electric sound, backed primarily by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. After an inappropriately short 15-minute set, Dylan left the stage to a hail of booing—mostly a response to the headliner’s unexpectedly abbreviated performance rather than to his electrification. He returned for a two-song acoustic encore. Nonetheless, reams were written about his electric betrayal and banishment from the folk circle. By the time of his next public appearance, at the Forest Hills (New York) Tennis Stadium a month later, the audience had been “instructed” by the press how to react. After a well-received acoustic opening set, Dylan was joined by his new backing band (Al Kooper on keyboards, Harvey Brooks on bass, and, from the Hawks, Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson and drummer Levon Helm). Dylan and the band were booed throughout the performance; incongruously, the audience sang along with “Like a Rolling Stone,” the number two song in the United States that week, and then booed at its conclusion.

Backed by Robertson, Helm, and the rest of the Hawks (Rick Danko on bass, Richard Manuel on piano, and Garth Hudson on organ and saxophone), Dylan toured incessantly in 1965 and 1966, always playing to sold-out, agitated audiences. On November 22, 1965, Dylan married Sara Lowndes. They split their time between a townhouse in Greenwich Village and a country estate in Woodstock, New York.

In February 1966, at the suggestion of his new producer, Bob Johnston, Dylan recorded at Columbia’sNashville, Tennessee, studios, along with Kooper, Robertson, and the cream of Nashville’s play-for-pay musicians. A week’s worth of marathon 20-hour sessions produced a double album that was more polished than the raw, almost punklike Highway 61 Revisited. Containing some of Dylan’s finest work,Blonde on Blonde peaked at number nine in Billboard, was critically acclaimed, and pushed Dylan to the zenith of his popularity. He toured Europe with the Hawks (soon to reemerge as the Band) until the summer of 1966, when a motorcycle accident in Woodstock brought his amazing seven-year momentum to an abrupt halt. Citing a serious neck injury, he retreated to his home in Woodstock and virtually disappeared for two years.

During his recuperation, Dylan edited film footage from his 1966 European tour that was to be shown on television but instead surfaced years later as the seldom-screened film Eat the Document. In 1998 some of the audio recordings from the film, including portions of Dylan’s performance at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, were released as the album Live 1966.

In 1967 the Band moved to Woodstock to be closer to Dylan. Occasionally they coaxed him into the basement studio of their communal home to play music together, and recordings from these sessions ultimately became the double album The Basement Tapes (1975). In early 1968 Columbia released a stripped-down album of new Dylan songs titled John Wesley Harding. At least partly because of public curiosity about Dylan’s seclusion, it reached number two on the Billboard album chart (eight places higher than Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, released in 1967).

In January 1968 Dylan made his first postaccident appearance at a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie in New York City. His image had changed; with shorter hair, spectacles, and a neglected beard, he resembled a rabbinical student. At this point Dylan adopted the stance he held for the rest of his career: sidestepping the desires of the critics, he went in any direction but those called for in print. When his audience and critics were convinced that his muse had left him, Dylan would deliver an album at full strength, only to withdraw again.

Dylan returned to Tennessee to record Nashville Skyline (1969), which helped launch an entirely new genre, country rock. It charted at number three, but, owing to the comparative simplicity of its lyrics, people questioned whether Dylan remained a cutting-edge artist. Meanwhile, rock’s first bootleg album, The Great White Wonder—containing unreleased, “liberated” Dylan recordings—appeared in independent record stores. Its distribution methods were shrouded in secrecy (certainly Columbia, whose contract with Dylan the album violated, was not involved).

Over the next quarter century Dylan continued to record, toured sporadically, and was widely honoured, though his impact was never as great or as immediate as it had been in the 1960s. In 1970 Princeton (New Jersey) University awarded him an honorary doctorate of music. His first book,Tarantula, a collection of unconnected writings, met with critical indifference when it was unceremoniously published in 1971, five years after its completion. In August 1971 Dylan made a rare appearance at a benefit concert that former Beatle George Harrison had organized for the newly independent nation of Bangladesh. At the end of the year, Dylan purchased a house in Malibu, California; he had already left Woodstock for New York City in 1969.

In 1973 he appeared in director Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and contributed to the sound track, including “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Writings and Drawings, an anthology of his lyrics and poetry, was published the next year. In 1974 he toured for the first time in eight years, reconvening with the Band (by this time popular artists in their own right). Before the Flood, the album documenting that tour, reached number three.

Released in January 1975, Dylan’s next studio album, Blood on the Tracks, was a return to lyrical form. It topped the Billboard album chart, as did Desire, released one year later. In 1975 and 1976 Dylan barnstormed North America with a gypsylike touring company, announcing shows in radio interviews only hours before appearing. Filmed and recorded, the Rolling Thunder Revue—including Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Roger McGuinn—came to motion-picture screens in 1978 as part of the four-hour-long, Dylan-edited Renaldo and Clara.

Lowndes and Dylan divorced in 1977. They had four children, including son Jakob, whose band the Wallflowers experienced pop success in the 1990s. Dylan was also stepfather to a child from Lowndes’s previous marriage. In 1978 Dylan mounted a yearlong world tour and released a studio album, Street-Legal, and a live album, Bob Dylan at Budokan. In a dramatic turnabout, he converted to Christianity in 1979 and for three years recorded and performed only religious material, preaching between songs at live shows. Critics and listeners were, once again, confounded. Nonetheless, Dylan received a Grammy Award in 1980 for best male rock vocal performance with his “gospel” song “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

By 1982, when Dylan was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, his open zeal for Christianity was waning. In 1985 he participated in the all-star charity recording “We Are the World,” organized by Quincy Jones, and published his third book, Lyrics: 1962–1985. Dylan toured again in 1986–87, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and in 1987 he costarred in the film Hearts of Fire. A year later he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Traveling Wilburys (Dylan, Petty, Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison) formed at his house in Malibu and released their first album.

In 1989 Dylan once again returned to form with Oh Mercy, produced byDaniel Lanois. When Life magazine published a list of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century in 1990, Dylan was included, and in 1991 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy. In 1992 Columbia Records celebrated the 30th anniversary of Dylan’s signing with a star-studded concert in New York City. Later this event was released as a double album and video. As part of Bill Clinton’s inauguration as U.S. president in 1993, Dylan sang “Chimes of Freedom” in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

As the 1990s drew to a close, Dylan, who was called the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century by Allen Ginsberg, performed for the pope at the Vatican, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, received a Kennedy Center Honor, and was made Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters (the highest cultural award presented by the French government). In 1998, in a comeback of sorts, he won three Grammy Awards—including album of the year—for Time Out of Mind (1997). In 2000 he was honoured with a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best original song for “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys. Another Grammy (for best contemporary folk album) came Dylan’s way in 2002, for Love and Theft (2001).

In 2003 he cowrote and starred in the film Masked & Anonymous and began favouring keyboards over guitar in live appearances. The next year he released what portended to be the first in a series of autobiographies, Chronicles: Volume 1. In 2005 No Direction Home, a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese, appeared on television. Four hours long, yet covering Dylan’s career only up to 1967, it was widely hailed by critics. A sound track album that included 26 previously unreleased tracks came out before the documentary aired. In 2006 Dylan turned his attention to satellite radio as the host of the weekly Theme Time Radio Hour and released Modern Times, which won a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk album. Dylan also received an award for best solo rock vocal performance for “Someday Baby.”

In presenting to Dylan Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts in 2007, the jury called him a “living myth in the history of popular music and a light for a generation that dreamed of changing the world,” and in 2008 the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded him a special citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture.” In 2009 Dylan released Together Through Life, which debuted at the top of the British and American album charts. He was still actively performing as he entered his 70s, and his 35th studio album, the rootsy Tempest (2012), found him as vigorous as ever. Dylan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

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