Author: chrisgregory (Chris Gregory)

  It was the last thing we expected.  For some, it was a shock. For others, it was a complete turn off. For almost half a decade in the 2010s, we were presented with no new Bob Dylan songs. Instead we got no less than FIVE albums of Dylan singing selections from what, in recent...

In My Own Version of You Dylan assumes a comic-gothic persona in a song that can be seen as a kind of ‘manual’ for his late period songwriting. By the time Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, the fact that his songs were partly constructed of quotations from and references to other songs, works of...

In his directorial style Dylan is heavily influenced by European art cinema. In a contemporary interview he stated that his favourite director was the great Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel, whose startling films continually challenge the audience to examine the nature of ‘normal reality’. The dreamlike sequencing of the movie is a counter point to these...

    …I’ll tell you what my film is about: it’s about the naked alienation of the inner self against the outer self – alienation taken to the extreme… …It’s about identity – about everybody’s identity – so we superimpose our own vision on Renaldo: it’s his vision and it’s his dream… Bob Dylan, extracts...

Although Bob Dylan made his name primarily as a writer of ‘protest’ songs, a number of the ‘love songs’ he wrote in his early ‘acoustic’ phase have become established standards. What makes these songs so memorable is their emotional realism. They have been covered by literally hundreds of male and female artists in a very...

           Ok, let’s be honest, folks. There are times when being a Bob Dylan fan is what you might call ‘challenging’….All the tired horses in the sun…. Mmmm… They Killed Him with an ‘angelic’ children’s choir….O Little Town of Bethlehem… well, yes… The bit in We Are the World where Stevie Wonder has to...