Category Archives: Bob Dylans’s best songs

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

Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: Tryin’ To Get To Heaven

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The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
-Bob Dylan (Tryin’ To Get To Heaven)

Environment affects me a great deal,a lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: ‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work. ‘ I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time, and I think a lot of that is instilled into this record.
-Bob Dylan – about “Time Out Of Mind” (to John Pareles, Sept 1997

The life here is drained, vampire-like, from a whole slew of blues songs, it’s title probably taken from the American Folk Song “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin”.. This is “Blind Willie McTell” with a hangover, a picture of the old south, “riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane” and shaking the sugar down.
There is an extraordinary harmonica break, like the best of Dylan, where it carries on the sense of the lyrics into a place where language no longer works.
-Brian Hinton (Bob Dylan Complete Discography)

Studio version:

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

Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: I’ll Keep It With Mine

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You will search, babe
At any cost
But how long, babe
Can you search for what’s not lost?
Everybody will help you
Some people are very kind
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine

“I’ll Keep It with Mine,”·a heartbreakingly lovely solo performance on piano and harmonica, did turn up on Biograph, after sitting in the vault for twenty years. How can Dylan record something so beautiful and then let it remain unreleased? This is a question that gets asked again and again, which is why so many people collect Dylan tapes or buy boodlegs (illegal, unauthorized) Dylan albums.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)

And what an exquisite song it is. Author Paul Cable once described “I’ll Keep It with Mine” as “possibly the best thing he had written up to that point . . . [while] the lyrics form the least patronizing way I have yet heard of saying, ‘I’m older than you—therefore I know better.’” In just three verses, bound to a three-line refrain, Dylan manages to encapsulate so much of what he had been hoping to say in the trio of songs to Suze. In her case, though, he hadn’t got beyond his tangled feelings long enough to whisper words like, “If I can save you any time / Come on, give it to me / I’ll keep it with mine.”
-Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973)

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

The Best Bob Dylan songs: Mr. Tambourine Man

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bob dylan mr tambourine man

My thoughts, my personal needs have always been expressed through my songs; you can feel them there even in ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
~Bob Dylan (to Sandra Jones – June 1981)

Even a song like Mr. Tambourine Man really isn’t a fantasy. There’s substance to the dream. Because you’ve seen it, you know? In order to have a dream, there’s something in front of you. You have to have seen something or have heard something for you to dream it. It becomes your dream then.
~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan – March 1985)

Spotify:

@ #12 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. The original version from “Bringing It All Back Home” was recorded on January 15 – 1965 @ the third recording session.

….and proceeded to record the final versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright, Ma” & “Gates Of Eden” in a single take* with no playback between songs… it’s as though all three songs came out of him in one breath, easily the greatest breath drawn by an American artist since Ginsberg & Kerouac exhaled “Howl” & “On The Road” a decade earlier..
~Paul Williams (BD Performing Artist 1960-73)

*although this has been found not to be entirely true (after PW wrote his book).. It’s still a GREAT quote.

Bob Dylan - bringing it all back home

The specific Tambourine Man he had in mind was Bruce Langhorne, the magnificent multi-instrumentalist who would usher in Dylan’s electric era with some spellbinding guitar playing on Bringing It All Back Home (notably on “Mr. Tambourine Man” itself).
~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the air)

Live at the Newport Folk Festival – 1964:

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October 24: Bob Dylan recorded “Hurricane” in 1975

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bobhurricane75
Bob Dylan visiting Rubin Carter in Prison, 1975 (Ken Regan)

@ Columbia Studio 1  in New York City, New York – 24 October 1975: Bob Dylan’s 6th and last Desire recording session, produced by Don DeVito.

In this session he tried Hurricane 10 times, no other songs were tried.

A splice of takes 2 & 6 was released on his great album “Desire” –  16 January 1976.

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

Here it is:

Spotify:

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And here are some other versions as well:

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