Category Archives: Bob Dylans’s best songs

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

2 Comments

bob dylan - the jack of hearts

The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down
Anyone with any sense had already left town
He was standin’ in the doorway lookin’ like the Jack of Hearts
~Bob Dylan (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)

The uses of a ballad have changed to such a degree. When they were singing years ago, it would be as entertainment . . . A fellow could sit down and sing a song for a half hour, and everybody could listen, and you could form opinions. You’d be waiting to see how it ended, what happened to this person or that person. It would be like going to a movie … Now we have movies, so why does someone want to sit around for a half hour listening to a ballad? Unless the story was of such a nature that you couldn’t find it in a movie.
-Bob Dylan (to John Cohen, June 1968)

This epic ballad appears to have been wholly inspired by Dylan’s experience of making the movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a genre which suited both ballad and b-movies: The Western.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs – Tangled Up In Blue

6 Comments

A song that took me ten years to live and two years to write
~Bob Dylan

So that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or you see it altogether. I wanted that song to be like a painting.
~Bob Dylan

Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue. And it affected me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And it just stayed in my head and when I wrote that song I wondered, what’s that mean? And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that’s what happened, y’know.
~Bob Dylan (to Craig McGregor, March 1978)

This masterpiece in number 3 on my list of Dylans 200 best songs. Listening to it almost never fails to put me in a state of flow.. time stops.. there is nothing except this beautiful piece of art occupying my attention.. best form of mindful meditation if you ask me.

It is the best song from one of his best albums: “Blood On The Tracks” (1975):

We allow our past to exist. Our credibility is based on our past. But deep in our soul we have no past. I don’t think we have a past anymore than we have a name. You can say we have a past if we have a future. Do we have a future? No. So how can our past exist if the future doesn’t exist?
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Cott, Dec 1977)

But we’re only dealing with the past in terms of being able to be healed by it. We can communicate only because we both agree that this is a glass and this is a bowl and that’s a candle and there’s a window here and there are lights out in the city. Now I might not agree with that. Turn this glass around and it’s something else. Now I’m hiding it in a napkin. Watch it now. Now you don’t even know it’s there. It’s the past… I don’t even deal with it. I don’t think seriously about the past, the present or the future. I’ve spent enough time thinking about these things and have gotten nowhere.
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Cott, Dec 1977)

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs – Tangled Up In Blue →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, Sound

What I look most forward to on Bootleg series volume 11 The Basement Tapes Complete

7 Comments

ScreenClip

This is a tremendous song with exceptional singing by Bob Dylan, one of the lost masterpieces that will finally come out with good (better) sound! It sounds as if it was intended as a parody, of sorts, but turns into something all together different. This is great gospel music.  Clinton Heylin wrote in the Telegraph, “…this seven-minute testifying spiritual seems to be largely improvised, and wholly inspired.”

Sign on the Cross is actually one of Bob Dylan’s very best performances. This seven minute gospel gem is perfect, from Garth Hudson’s swirling church organ down to Bob’s inspired (and probably) drunken preachings. I have listened to the song over and over, and marvelled at the thought of this song not getting an official release! That is, until now. I am eagerly awaiting my box-set and hoping for a miracle sound wise, like we got on the last Bootleg release (vol.10)

Bob Dylan – Sign on the cross:

“This one sounds pretty straightforward at first, as Dylan leads the Band through some timeworn gospel changes. Robbie Robertson ekes out gorgeous guitar lines worthy of Curtis Mayfield and Garth Hudson’s organ swells at all the right moments, coaxing a truly remarkable vocal from their leader. Things take a turn for the weird, however, around 4:25, when Dylan slips into an off-the-cuff spoken monologue, coming off as a country-fried preacher who may have been dipping into his moonshine supply. What began as pure holiness starts sounding just a little bit creepy. “

– pitchfork

complete

Continue reading What I look most forward to on Bootleg series volume 11 The Basement Tapes Complete →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

1 Comment
Verlaine & Rimbaud
“Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud”

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go
~Bob Dylan (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

Much of the song is thus delivered, so lightly as to suggest that it’s in brackets, with the same sparkling, generous humour. Astonishing that a man who, by the time he made this album, had been monstrously famous for over a decade and had been acclaimed as a genius before he was 25, could have the down-to-earth self-knowledge to
throw out, in this song, so ordinarily humorous and puckish a phrase as the one that ends this stanza: ‘You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’ / Stayin’ far behind without you / You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’— / You’re gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to . . .’
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

And how smoothly the album slips from this orgy of marital upchuck into the lightest, most innocent, most enticing love song of the whole batch, a throwaway which on closer inspection seems quite as brilliant (in composition and performance) as anything else here: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” So clever, so perfect, to have a song that puts any separation squarely in the future, instead of present, near past, or distant past.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

Grooveshark:
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Spotify:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re A Big Girl Now

Bob Dylan & Sara

I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart
~Bob Dylan (You’re A Big Girl Now)

You’re Big Girl Now” is startling in the originality of its musical structure as well as in the raw power of Dylan’s lyrics and the way he sings them. Each verse of this song is a separate monolog, as if Dylan were an actor stepping to the back of the stage and then coming forward again as he thinks of something else he wants to say to the lady.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

..‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ presses on still further with the unsparing examination of whether a decaying relationship can withstand the strains of time and other lovers
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

Original version (BOOT version):

Grooveshark:
You’re a Big Girl Now by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Spotify:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re A Big Girl Now →