Advertisement

Bob Dylan: 10 essential tracks you need in your life as singer-songwriter turns 79

Bob Dylan performs on stage during the 21st edition of the Vieilles Charrues music festival on 22 July, 2012 in Carhaix-Plouguer, western France: (FRED TANNEAU/AFP/GettyImages)
Bob Dylan performs on stage during the 21st edition of the Vieilles Charrues music festival on 22 July, 2012 in Carhaix-Plouguer, western France: (FRED TANNEAU/AFP/GettyImages)

Distilling Bob Dylan’s répertoire into 10 songs is like trying to summarise the dictionary in 10 words: it’s daunting. It’s impossible. It’s a little bit excruciating. If choosing is refusing, choosing 10 Bob Dylan songs means refusing hundreds – he’s written more than 350 – of beautifully crafted, Nobel-Prize-worthy tunes.

Yet it’s a worthwhile exercise. After all, those who have never paid much attention to Dylan – and those who want to brush up on their knowledge ahead of his Hyde Park concert with Neil Young in July – have to start somewhere.

Dylan’s songs have been called literary masterpieces. They have been credited with changing history. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” – interpreted many times as a warning against nuclear warfare, which Dylan himself has denied – made Beat poet Allen Ginsberg weep the first time he heard it. “I Want You” failed to woo French singer Françoise Hardy when a (reportedly smitten) Dylan sang it to her in person in the mid-Sixties.

Six decades after Dylan left his native Minnesota for the musical scene of Greenwich Village, here are his 10 essential songs.

10. "Song to Woody"

One of two originals on Dylan's first studio album – otherwise comprised of folk classics such as "House of the Rising Sun" and "Man of Constant Sorrow" – "Song to Woody" is a touching ballad dedicated to 21-year-old Dylan's idol, folk icon Woody Guthrie.

The song is an early exemplification of Dylan's literary prowess – the world, in his eyes, "Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn / It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born". It's a vestige of the time when Robert Zimmerman, having left his native Minnesota and visited an ailing Guthrie at the Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, officially became Bob Dylan.

9. "Ballad of a Thin Man"

Released just a month after Dylan's infamous electric concert at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival – seen by many as a sign that Dylan was turning his back on the protest songs and folk répertoire that had made him famous – "Ballad of a Thin Man" is haunted by Dylan's piano motif and is dripping with contempt.

The song is one of the jewels that emerged from the breathless mid-Sixties period during which Dylan put out two albums in the same year – Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, both released in 1965 – and embarked on the infamously exhausting England tour documented in DA Pennebaker's documentary Dont Look Back.

8. "Blowin’ in the Wind"

One of Dylan's most celebrated and best known compositions, "Blowin' in the Wind" epitomises the early-Sixties protest songs that earned Dylan the title of "spokesman of a generation" – much to his dismay.

As folk tradition dictates, it has been covered by a variety of other performers, including Neil Young, Dolly Parton, and – of course – Joan Baez.

7. "Masters of War"

Perhaps the most straightforward of Dylan's protest songs, "Masters of War", like "Blowin' in the Wind" is one of the titles that made history after being released in 1963 on Dylan's second studio album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Dylan himself insisted in a 2001 interview with USA Today that the song wasn't an anti-war anthem but a "pacific song against war".

"It's speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency," he told the publication. "That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up."

6. "Like a Rolling Stone"

The six-minute song is, in many ways, Dylan's magnum opus.

It emerged from his post England tour period during which, according to Dylan himself, he was tired, unhappy with the media's attention, and ready to quit the music business – until "Like A Rolling Stone" came along.

Despite a chaotic infancy – Dylan had ranted for several pages and the six-minute length meant Columbia Records didn't foresee a bright future for the tune – "Like a Rolling Stone" has become an iconic chapter not only in the Dylan narrative, but in music history as well.

Rolling Stone previously placed it at the very top of its ranking of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Dylan has played it live 2,044 times so far.

5. "Sara"

Featured at the close of the 1976 album Desire, "Sara" is a poetic, surrealist account of Dylan's love for – and crumbling 12-year marriage with – his first wife, Sara Dylan.

The track circles back to Dylan's previous release, the 1975 Blood on the Tracks, which has been billed as a candid account of the pair's disintegrating love story.

Despite Dylan's pleading lyrics (Sara, Sara, don't ever leave me / Don't ever go), the couple divorced the following year.

4. "Man in the long black coat"

Sung in the croaky voice of Oh Mercy, "Man in the Long Black Coat" has been somewhat overshadowed by some of the other songs on the 1989 album, which earned Dylan positive reviews after the poorly received Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded, and Down in the Groove.

Perhaps the song doesn't have the strong message of "Political World", or the pure simplicity of "Ring Them Bells", but it's a beautiful demonstration of Dylan's hypnotic writing, a successful iteration of his Eighties crooning style, and – thanks to interludes filled mainly with the sounds of a guitar, a base, and chirping crickets – a reminder that music exists in silence as much as it does in sound.

Also, you can waltz to it.

3. "Idiot wind"

If Blood On The Tracks is a divorce tale, then "Idiot Wind" is Dylan's break-up anthem.

It's Dylan talking about heartache, so naturally, the lyrics are stunning and searing at once.

What makes the song unique is Dylan's no-holds-barred, profoundly earnest singing, combined with the kind of chorus you might want to sing at the top of your lungs – perhaps to let go of some sorrow and righteous anger, perhaps while clutching a box of tissues, perhaps after a couple of drinks. Whatever the circumstances dictate.

2. "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

Another "greatest song of all time" contender, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is peak mid-60s Dylan, with Jack Kerouac, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Chuck Berry among its inspirations.

The song made history in part thanks to its famous music video, which was originally shot in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London for the documentary Dont Look Back.

In the clip, Dylan holds up cue cards that, at first, correspond to the song's lyrics – only to get more creative as the video goes on.

1. "Blind Willie McTell"

The track ticks several boxes of a young Dylan's signature style, with the evocative imagery of a "Desolation Row" and American history references à la "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" – while marrying them with the lyricism of his Eighties productions.

"Blind Willie McTell", of which The Band also recorded an acclaimed version, was released in The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 in 1991 but originated during the recording sessions for Infidels, the 1983 album that ended a string of three Christian-influenced albums and earned Dylan renewed critical acclaim.

Read more

Bob Dylan in 2019? He sounds like a pub singer with a throat infection