Category Archives: Bob Dylans’s best songs

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, The Best Songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Every Grain of Sand

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bob dylan smoking 1981

That was an inspired song that came to me. I felt like I was just putting down words that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out.
~Bob Dylan (“Biograph” notes)

“That’s an excellent song, very painless song to write,… It took like 12 seconds – or that’s how it felt.”
~Bob Dylan (to Robert Hilburn – Feb 1992)

…But “Every Grain of Sand” is something special: the “Chimes of Freedom” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” of Bob Dylan’s Christian period. A pearl among swine, it has surety and strength all down the line. Also vulnerability.
~Paul Nelson (from his famous “Rolling Stone Magazine” review of “Shot Of Love” – Oct. 1981)

 

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: Mississippi

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bob dylan mississippi

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Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

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I’ve been criticised for not putting my best songs on certain albums but it is because I consider that the song isn’t ready yet. It’s not been recorded right. With all of my records, there’s an abundance of material left off – stuff that, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t make the final cut. ..Except on this album, for which we re-cut the song ‘Mississippi.’ We had that on the “Time Out Of Mind” album. It wasn’t recorded very well but thank God, it never got out, so we recorded it again. But something like that would never have happen ten years ago. You’d have probably all heard the lousy version of it and I’d have never re-recorded it. I’m glad for once to have had the opportunity to do so.
~Bob Dylan (Press Conference (French coverage) De la Ville Inter-Continental Roma Hotel, Rome, Italy –  23 July 2001 )

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“Mississippi” is a beautiful, powerful song, something of an anchor for the album. I can easily believe that the lyrics and the melody are intended to convey majesty and heroism. Dylan’s performance of the song gets these feelings across with a lot of charm and humor and empathy.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond)

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Having allowed Sheryl Crow to release her version of the song ahead of his, Dylan decided it was high time he reclaimed it. The new arrangement prompted him to claim to Fricke that ‘on the [“Love and Theft”] performance, the bass is playing a triplet beat, and that adds up to all the multirhythm you need, even in a slow tempo song’. What he no longer had was a voice he could command at will. The “Love and Theft” version, and the live counterparts he introduced in 2001, benefit from an arrangement which left any dirge-like element in the dust. But that vocal timbre had not so much diminished as disappeared beneath its crag-like remains. ‘Mississippi’ had stayed in his closet half a decade too long.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

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July 20: Bob Dylan released Like A Rolling Stone in 1965

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July 20: Bob Dylan released Like A Rolling Stone in 1965

“This is about growing up, this is about discovering what is going on around you, realizing that life isn’t all you’ve been told. So now you’re without a home, you’re on your own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That’s a liberating thing. This is a song about liberation.”
— Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine (Greil Marcus – Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (book))

“The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind” – Bruce Springsteen (Jan 1988)

“When I heard Like a Rolling Stone, I wanted to quit the music business because I felt: ‘If this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else.'”
– Frank Zappa (1965 )

The first time I really listened to “Like A Rolling Stone”, I felt I entered a parallel universe.. a place of intense beauty.. a place filled with this wonderful blues-fueled rock music… and a spellbinding ..organ! I had never heard anything like it.. anything this good..

That was the day I understood that there is bad music, good music, great music & then there is Bob Dylan. He plays in another league. His musical universe is still as beautiful now as it was first time I flew into it.. “Like A Rolling Stone” still sounds as fresh as it did the first time I listened ~30 years ago. (Egil, alldylan.com)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, The Best Songs

Great song: Pay in Blood by Bob Dylan – A land built on slavery.

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Bob Dylan says the stigma of slavery ruined America and he doubts the country can get rid of the shame because it was “founded on the backs of slaves.”

Bob Dylan told in a recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine that in America “people are at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color, it will hold any nation back.” He went on to say that black people know that some white people  “didn’t want to give up slavery.”

Dylan continued with, “If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today.”

When asked on his opinion if President Barack Obama was helping to shift a change, Dylan said: “I don’t have any opinion on that. You have to change your heart if you want to change.”

My third choice of songs from Bob Dylan’s new album is the “angry speech”, Pay in Blood. I call it an angry speech because it is clearly a man with lot on his mind who vents his thoughts in this song, or maybe it is three men? It is not a story-song (as such), this is someone’s view of their world at a particular moment. This man is, Bob Dylan, on one level. It’s about his life, but it is also so much more. Again I think it paints a picture of Americas past and present.

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April 16: Bob Dylan – Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart

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This is not the jokerman. This is someone whose heart can be got ahold of. And in a real sense this person is more vulnerable, and even more in need of a place to hide, than the genius who could write and perform “Blind Willie McTell.”
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

It’s getting harder and harder to recognize the trap
Too much information about nothing, too much educated rap
Never could learn to drink that blood, and call it wine
What looks large from a distance, close up is never that big
~Bob Dylan (Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart)

Great song recorded during the “infidels” sessions in 1983, but sadly not included on the released album.

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It later developed into “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)”, recorded during the “Empire Burlesque” sessions in 1985 (and released on that album).

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