I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow. So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this.
Bob Dylan was the source of pop music’s unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.
You listen to Bob Dylan and you can’t help but think of the 60s, it’s very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn’t come from them it comes from the universe and it’s to be shared. At best, we’re skilled presenters, and I say that at best.
If they made a movie about Bob Dylan, I would love to play a young Bob Dylan; I mean, I’ve got the wild hair.
I think I’m the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.
In New York, I’m around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.
We don’t need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn’t be Woody Guthrie… I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don’t need the 50th generation version of it.
It’s like there’s the rest of the world, and then there’s America. Part of the reason I would really love continue to making music over here because so much of American music has inspired me, whether it’s Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.
I still listen to a lot of the classics from Bob Dylan and John Martin, but I love electronic music as well. I’m a big fan of an Australian DJ and producer called Flume, who I think is incredible. He should be more successful in the U.K.!
At the ‘L.A. Times,’ I always wanted to write about artists I thought were meaningful. So I interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eminem, White Stripes. And I could understand how almost everybody I interviewed had a sense of artistry.
When I go back to seek inspiration – whether it be from Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Ray Charles or Bob Dylan – it’s from the performance. Those artists are in the studio playing their instrument and singing. There’s no going back and redoing the vocals.
The only thing about rock n’ roll in my house is a couple of paintings of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan – and they were expensive, too.
Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.
I didn’t sound anything like Capote at the screen test. It was more like Bob Dylan. In his early years. With the flu.
The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that writing ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’ was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan – artists no one has ever heard of.
Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.
I would say that Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life. That’s just the truth.
Bob Dylan is the Jew of all time.
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.
It’s even easier to write about the past now that I’m happy and have better stuff to write about. That’s why someone like Bob Dylan can make so many records over so long a time; it’s not like he’s been sad all this time. He’s really successful!
I’ve always liked acoustic blues. I liked Bob Dylan a lot.
My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.
There’s that Bob Dylan quote: ‘He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.’ That’s a great line. And I really believe that.
I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.
Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do ‘Things Have Changed,’ or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo’s ‘The David’ or that movie ‘Lost in Translation’ – it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.
Dave Van Ronk, for those who don’t know him – probably most don’t know – was a folk singer. He’s kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.
The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn’t kick me out of his class. He turned me on to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’ I had picked up Dylan with ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn’t heard.
People like Howlin’ Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart – all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there’s a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
We didn’t have the phrase ‘style icon’ when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets – I liked how they dressed – and Catholic school boys.
I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world’s hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan’s work for sure – he’s the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public.
Everybody who I ever cared about has told me that they like my music: Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Al Green, The Spinners, Smokey Robinson. Everybody that matters.
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.
I think everyone mentions Bob Dylan, but he’s someone I just admire so much as a songwriter. I think people write songs, and then there’s Bob Dylan songs. He’s one step ahead of just everybody else.
Bob Dylan has a way with words that simply blows me away. When he forgets his lyrics he just makes up new ones on the spot, that is what I called talented!
Well, I love Bob Dylan, let’s make that clear. He’s one of my musical heroes.
I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.
That’s who I wanted to be like was Bob Dylan.
My favorite Bob Dylan record is the very first one where he sings one Bob Dylan song and the rest of them are his interpretations of the Dust Bowl-era folk songs, or even going back as far as the mass influx of people coming into the U.S. during the gold rush. His interpretations of those songs are incredible.
People often ask us if we had direct influences. Honestly, just a lot of different music – not necessarily individual people. We listen to anything from Bob Dylan to Massive Attack to Aerosmith to En Vogue. We very much enjoy all that music.
I love Bob Dylan. ‘Blood on the Tracks’ is one of my top five records.
It was my love for the guitar that first got me into music and singing. Growing up, I was inspired by The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Damian Rice was a huge influence for me musically.
Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.
Lolita’ was written at a time when we were heavily listening to more dance, electronic, and trance, and then on the flip side we were writing country-pop songs like ‘Born Bob Dylan’ or our acoustic songs, or trip-hop.
For someone like me, who has grown up with Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, it’s hard not to invest a lot of myself in what I do.
I think Alison Krauss is one of the most amazing singers ever. As a songwriter – this is gonna sound cheesy – I love Randy Newman. And my mom passed on a love of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. At one point I was so into the Indigo Girls, just like I was so into the Dixie Chicks, those female harmonies.
By 27, Bob Dylan had already written ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ the Beatles had released ‘Rubber Soul,’ Bruce Springsteen had recorded ‘Born to Run’ and U2 had delivered ‘The Joshua Tree.’
Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term ‘still’ seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.
