At his 84th birthday last Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. It was in accordance with not only his still serious tour calendarBut also his apparently irrepressible instinct for work: on music, on writing, on painting, on sculpture. Even his own Occasional tweet Draw an audience recognizing each time. The Bob Dylan of 2025 is not, of course, the 1965 Bob Dylan, but then, the 1965 bob Dylan was not the 1964 Bob Dylan. This constant artistic change is exactly what his fans appreciate, not that they do not yet put his first things with regularity.
In the earliest of these first things, as the Youtuber music David Hartley explains The new video aboveDylan “wrote songs by reinventing tradition”. Using that his voice, his guitar and his harmonica, the young Dylan “imitated some of the most famous folk melodies”, placing himself in this long American tradition of borrowing and reinterpretation. But as dramatized in the recent film A complete unknownHe quickly “Electric Goes”, and with the change of instrumentation came a change in the method of writing songs: “He would just offer the endless pages of words, something he once called” the long piece of vomit “. “”
The advice to “vomit now and clean it later” has long been given, in various forms, to budding artists around the world. An aspect that deserves to be highlighted on how Dylan has done, is that, despite the writing of popular songs, he was inspired by a great inspiration from more traditional literature, to the point that his notes hardly seem to contain anything resembling verses or choirs. It is only in the studio, with a group behind him, that Dylan could give these ideas their final musical form – or rather, their final form on this particular album, often to be constantly modified, and sometimes radically, for decades of live performance to come.
Hartley tells more dramatic changes to Dylan's music and its creation process. The motorcycle crash, the Bases of basementThe open setting, Blood on the slopes: All this is now half a century or more in the past. To follow all the ways in which Dylan has approached music since then, it would take more hours than everyone, but the most rabid amateurs (although there are many). The video includes a 60 minutes 2004 clip in which Dylan says that “these first songs were almost magic written” and that he could no longer create them. But then, the Dylan could not either Highway 61 revisited have recorded Time out of the mindAnd nor, moreover, the Dylan could not Time out of the mind recorded one of the albums of Dylan of this decade – or those which could, most likely, be still to come.
Related content:
A huge chronological reading list of 55 hours of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 tracks
How Bob Dylan created a musical and literary world all of his: four video trials
Look at Bob Dylan to make his debut at the Newport Folk Festival in the colorized images of 1963
Listen to the new Bob Dylan Nobel conference: a meditation on music, literature and lyrics
Bob Dylan explains why music has won
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
At Learnopoly, Finn has championed a mission to deliver unbiased, in-depth reviews of online courses that empower learners to make well-informed decisions. With over a decade of experience in financial services, he has honed his expertise in strategic partnerships and business development, cultivating both a sharp analytical perspective and a collaborative spirit. A lifelong learner, Finn’s commitment to creating a trusted guide for online education was ignited by a frustrating encounter with biased course reviews.