- “What they do with Dylan songs”: a request for examples
- Is there anyone else who can write songs in such a variety of styles as Bob?
By Tony Attwood
It is inevitable that when most of us write about Bob Dylan these days, as we approach the end of his career (or at least I presume so – if it has been discovered that he is immortal I must have missed that press release) inevitably most of us tend to focus on one aspect of his work.
That’s “Inevitable” because Bob’s work is unique in several ways. Very few composers of note have written more separate items than Bob has, and most of those that have, have produced work that is difficult for people like me to evaluate in that it is not in the Western music tradition.
But then I began to wonder – supposing a composer wrote 500 songs all in the 12 bar blues format, would that really count as 500 songs? I mean the chord structure is already laid down, and the second line always repeats the first, so is that really a different song each time?
I mean “Times they are a changin” is obviously quite different from “Don’t think twice”, but I can be definitive in that statements and know I am right that because I listen to western music every day.
So maybe I should just consider western music, but even here I have a bit of a problem because the answer most connoisseurs of western music will give you for who has written the most music is Georg Philip Telemann, a German composer who lived from 1681 to 1767 and who didn’t just write two minute long pieces, he wrote over 1000 cantatas among the 3,600 musical works attributed to him. So he didn’t dally around with three, four or even five minute songs, he really did deliver extended orchestral works. And some suggest he wrote far more than the 3600 works we now know, because a lot of them destroyed as they were in German archives that were bombed in the second world war.
And although he wrote a series of instrumental pieces in a specific form (the Tafelmusik) these can’t remotely be reduced to comparison with the repeated format of the 12 bar blues – for these orchestral works have a structure: an overture, a quartet, a concerto, a trio sonata, a solo sonata and an epilogue. The complete piece was played while the court was having a feast.
Now Telemann is not considered to be at the same level in terms of compositions as Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, but his work was highly regarded in his day and is still to be heard today. So in sheer numbers it is valid to put him at the top.
But to return to Bob. Up to the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan wrote about 245 songs – there is some dispute as to how many of the basement tape pieces are Bob originals, so I have been cautious with the number there. So at once you can see there is no way Bob is going to reach out to the thousands of pieces that Telemann produced. And there is some dispute as to how many of Bob’s songs are originals, but generally citing a number around 550 seems to be fairly safe.
And by way of comparison you might care to keep in mind this comment from Far Out magazine: when writing about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “We know that they had a hand in writing an astonishing 165 songs released either on Beatles studio albums and EPs or as singles, 162 of them released during a span of just eight years.”
Now that is quite an achievement, I would agree, but not quite up there with Bob, either in terms of numbers of the ability to keep going over time. And there were two of them.
But to come back to the opening question about what makes Bob special, we might consider not just the number of songs he has written, but also the variety of the songs he has written. Compare for example the four chord simplicity of the music of “The Times they are a changin” with songs such as “In the Garden” and “Spirit on the Water” and we can see just how far he travelled musically.
The first two lines of “In the Garden” alone are accompanied by seven different chords, three of which would not normally be considered chords to be used in a song in that key that this piece is in. If you want to try your hand at it there is an excellent setting out of the song on Dylanchords. Even if you don’t play a chordal instrument you can get a sense of just how complex this piece is. And you can compare this complexity with the simplicity of the four chord sequence of “Times they are a changing”. Both songs work and are extraordinary works of songmanship, but each is utterly different.
What is particularly interesting is that in this musically complex song Bob has written a set of lyrics that are much simpler than in many of his other songs. Here’s the second verse…
When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear? When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear? Nicodemus came at night so he wouldn't be seen by men Saying, "Master, tell me why a man must be born again." When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear? When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?
So here it is not the lyrics that make Bob special. Looking elsewhere there are of course multiple answers, but here is one: his unique ability to change from one style to another, from one musical approach to another, during his musical career.
A few years ago we did a piece here: The 54 songs that Bob has performed in the last four years with some musical examples. A few of them have vanished from the internet now but there are enough musical examples left to make my point. That is what makes Bob Dylan special. Not just his brilliance as a songwriter, but his variety as a songwriter also.