Category: Bob Dylan

The ‘Drawn Blank Series’, the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s paintings currently showing at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, provides a valuable insight into Dylan’s creative and imaginative processes. The paintings are based on a series of drawings Dylan completed in the late 80s and early 90s. In what the exhibition catalogue describes as ‘an intense burst...

        In the first verse Dylan begins with a simple statement of his intention to pursue his faith in his muse, combined with clear intimations of mortality which seem to motivate him. From the beginning the use of the pronoun ‘we’ involves the listener intimately in this process. …Every step of the...

    Despite his difficult relationship with the recording process and his focus on live performance, Bob Dylan has always conceived his albums as expressive units – groups of songs arranged in a particular order for specific effects. This is obvious in the case of albums as diverse as Blood On The Tracks, Nashville Skyline or...

…All must yield To the Avenging God…         In the mud and the blood of the makeshift trench, the soldier boy from Belvedere, South Carolina, is about to breathe his last. The Yankee bullet which had pierced his groin had come from some anonymous source, from the other side of the swirling...

Year by year the legend of The Basement Tapes grows. Here’s a few personal memories. I remember reading about the legendary Great White Wonder when I was at school in the late ‘60s. A little later, as a spotty teenager, I acquired a copy of The Little White Wonder, a white pressed bootleg album, in...

Happiness is but a state of mind. Anytime you want, you can cross the state line….   Waiting For You was written for the soundtrack of Callie Khouri’s 2002 movie, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a wryly bittersweet and avowedly feminist tale centred around the complex relationship between a mother and daughter. As with...

…I’m in the wrong town…. I should be in Hollywood…. If you strain your eyes hard enough at a Dylan performance, you will spot a small gold figurine wobbling on top of one of his band’s amplifiers. It’s there at virtually every gig. Dylan has even been known to grasp it and hold it aloof...

There’s no-one here, the gardener has gone… The hooded pilgrim advances along a thin, dusty dirt track. There is no moon. All along the skyline the fires rage. His hidden face contorts in shaded darkness. He burns inside. In front of him he seems to see the whole world, billions of outstretched hands calling for...

…I look in your eyes, I see nobody other than me, I see all that I am and all I hope to be… The secret language of the blues has always enthralled Bob Dylan. From his earliest days as a performer he has been irresistibly attracted to its sly, lascivious poetic sensibility, its subtle use...

The world has gone black before my eyes… Across the courtroom the judge reaches for his black cap. Now he is poised to settle it on his head. In that moment, for Lost John, time freezes. It is as if he has stepped out of himself, like he’s an actor in some projection of his...