Category Archives: Bob Dylans’s best songs

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan other, Bob Dylans's best songs, List

Bob Dylan: 30 best songs from the 1970s (poll)

27 Comments


bob dylan
Photo credit: Keith Baugh (keithbaugh.com)

I still write songs the same way I always did: I get a first line, the words and the tune together, and then I work out the rest wherever I happen to be, whenever I have time. If it’s really important, I’ll just make the time and try to finish it.
~To John Rockwell, Jan 1974

The saddest thing about songwriting is when you get something really good and you put it down for a while, and you take for granted that you’ll be able to get back to it with whatever inspired you to do it in the first place – well, whatever inspired you to do it in the first place is never there anymore. So then you’ve got to consciously stir up the inspiration to figure what it was about. Usually you get one good part and one not-sogood part, and the not-so-good wipes out the good part.
~To Bill Flanagan March 1985

 

This decade that gave us “Blood On The Tracks“, “Desire“, “Planet Waves“, “Street-Legal”, “New Morning“, “Slow Train Coming“, “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” & “Self Portrait”.

Continue reading Bob Dylan: 30 best songs from the 1970s (poll) →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan other, Bob Dylans's best songs, List

Bob Dylan’s best songs from the 1960s

30 Comments

672225d Bob Dylan

[on songwriting] The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sorta came down and I sorta took it down with a pencil that it was all there before I came around. That’s how I feel about it.
~to Pete Seeger, Broadside Show, WBAI-FM Radio, May 1962

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel.
~Nat Hentoff quoting Dylan, jacket notes Freewheeling Dylan

“It’s hard being free in a song – getting it all in. Songs are so confining. Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don’t have to do anything like that. But it’s not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the meter, but it still has to fit somehow. I’ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That’s why I write a lot of poetry – if that’s the word. Poetry can make it’s own form.”
~Nat Hentoff Interview, June 1964

“A song is anything that can walk by itself, I am called a songwriter. A poem is a naked person, some people say that I am a poet”.
~Jacket notes Subterranean Homesick Blues

—

Saturday (April 12 – 2014) I asked the question – What’s your top 5 Bob Dylan songs recorded in the 60’s ? – over at our Facebook page. As of writing 72 people (all Bob Dylan experts)  have uttered their opinions.

If you’re not on Facebook, or do not “like” our page.. you can use the comment section to post your 5 favorites.

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs from the 1960s →

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

Bob Dylan – Top 200 songs

24 Comments

bob_dylan

Well, I just drifted into it, you know. I started singing, writing my own songs some place or somewhere. I always kinda written my own songs but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs; the only person that I ever heard do that was Woody Guthrie. And then one day I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote that I performed in public was the song that I wrote to Woody Guthrie. And I just felt like playing it one night. And I played it.
~Bob Dylan (30 July 1984 – The Bert Kleinman Interview)

This is an ongoing series… I will fill in the holes as I create new posts…

1. Visions Of Johanna (Updated – 14.09.2018)
1. Like A Rolling Stone (Updated – 21.09.2018)
3. Tangled Up in Blue (Updated – 27.09.2018)
4. Ballad Of A Thin Man
5. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
6. Blind Willie McTell (electric version)
7. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
8. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
9. Desolation Row
10. Idiot Wind (New York version)
11. Every Grain Of Sand
12. Mr. Tambourine Man
13. Positively 4th Street
14. Subterranean Homesick Blues
15. Mississippi
16. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
17. She’s Your Lover Now
18. Shelter From the Storm
19. Brownsville Girl
20. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Continue reading Bob Dylan – Top 200 songs →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Let Me Die In My Footsteps

1 Comment

bob dylan-let-me-die-in-my-footsteps

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground

Let Me Die In My Footsteps written while Gil Turner and I were in Toronto in Dec. 1961. I set out to say something about fallout and bomb-testing but I didn’t want it to be a slogan song. Too many of the protest songs are bad music. Exception being Which Side Are You On. Most of the mining songs are good. Especially the bomb songs – usually awkward and with bad music. Which takes a stand – no beating around the bush.
~Bob Dylan (notebook entry for February 17, 1962)

“Let Me Die in My Footsteps” is Dylan’s first anthem, in the sense that “Pastures of Plenty” and “This Land Is Your Land” and “This Train Is Bound for Glory” are anthems-songs people can unite around, that can be sung as an expression of belonging, to a nation or a faith or a cause. The song is a refusal to go into a fallout shelter or into the fallout shelter mentality (“I will not go down under the groundfCause somebody tells me that death’s coming round”), a fist shaken at the death in the soul that fear brings, in effect a statement that I would rather risk dying in the flesh than choose a living death, cut off from what gives life its value.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)

TBS version:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: Let Me Die In My Footsteps →

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

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Dignity

13 Comments

bob dylan dignity

Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.
~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)
–
‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

–
@ #43 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. It was originally recorded for “Oh Mercy” in 1989, but Dylan wasn’t satisfied with it… and left it. Michael Gray points out that it would have been a perfect opening track to the album… way better than “Political World”… only thing missing was an instrumental solo in the middle.

I will not mess with too many details around the songs recording history.. even Clinton Heylin calls Dignity’s recording history a bit… messy….

–

Officially we now have 5 different versions available:

# released Album
1 1994 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3
Brendan O’Brien remixed version
2 1995 MTV Unplugged
Live version
3 2000 The Best of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2
Touched By An Angel version*
4 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Piano demo version
 5 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Tell Tale Signs version2

* First released on the album “Touched By An Angel: The Album” – TV Series soundtrack compilation (1998)

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: Dignity →