by Jeff Burger
ST: Still, when you’ve come out with some of your new albums of songs, those songs fit that specific time better than any songs that had already been written. Your new songs have always shown us new possibilities.
Dylan: It’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers. It’s bad luck to do that. No one should do that. Popular entertainers are fine, there’s nothing the matter with that but as long as you know where you’re standing and what ground you’re on, many of them, they don’t know what they’re doing either.
ST: But your songs are more than pop entertainment . . .
Dylan: Some people say so. Not to me.
ST: No?
Dylan: Pop entertainment means nothing to me. Nothing. You know, Madonna’s good. Madonna’s good, she’s talented, she puts all kind of stuff together, she’s learned her thing . . . But it’s the kind of thing which takes years and years out of your life to be able to do. You’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot to do that. Sacrifice. If you want to make it big, you’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot. It’s all the same, it’s all the same. [Laughs]
ST: Van Morrison said that you are our greatest living poet. Do you think of yourself in those terms?
Dylan: [Pause] Sometimes. It’s within me. It’s within me to put myself up and be a poet. But it’s a dedication. [Softly] It’s a big dedication. [Pause] Poets don’t drive cars. [Laughs] Poets don’t go to the supermarket. Poets don’t empty the garbage. Poets aren’t on the PTA. Poets, you know, they don’t go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don’t . . . Poets don’t even speak on the telephone. Poets don’t even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and . . . and usually they know why they’re poets! [Laughs] Yeah, there are . . . what can you say? The world don’t need any more poems, it’s got Shakespeare. There’s enough of everything. You name it, there’s enough of it. There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the lightbulb was going too far. Poets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code. [Pause] And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings. Look at Keats’ life. Look at Jim Morrison, if you want to call him a poet. Look at him. Although some people say that he is really in the Andes.
ST: Do you think so?
Dylan: Well, it never crossed my mind to think one way or the other about it, but you do hear that talk. Piggyback in the Andes. Riding a donkey.
ST: People have a hard time believing that Shakespeare really wrote all of his work because there is so much of it. Do you have a hard time accepting that?
Dylan: People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.
ST: Might they think that of you, years from now, that no one man could have produced so much incredible work?
Dylan: They could. They could look back and think nobody produced it. [Softly] It’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.
ST: But aren’t there songs of your own that you know will always be around?
Dylan: Who’s gonna sing them? My songs really aren’t meant to be covered. No, not really. Can you think of . . . Well, they do get covered, but it’s covered. They’re not intentionally written to be covered, but okay, they do.
ST: Your songs are much more enjoyable to sing and play than most songs . . .
Dylan: Do you play them on piano or guitar?
ST: Both.
Dylan: Acoustic guitar?
ST: Mostly.
Dylan: Do you play jazz? It never hurts to learn as many chords as you can. All kinds. Sometimes it will change the inflection of a whole song, a straight chord, or, say, an augmented seventh chord.
ST: Do you have favorite keys to work in?
Dylan: On the piano, my favorite keys are the black keys. And they sound better on guitar, too. Sometimes when a song’s in a flat key, say B flat, bring it to the guitar, you might want to put it in A. But . . . that’s an interesting thing you just said. It changes the reflection. Mainly in mine the songs sound different. They sound . . . when you take a black key song and put it on the guitar, which means you’re playing in A flat, not too many people like to play in those keys. To me it doesn’t matter. [Laughs] It doesn’t matter because my fingering is the same anyway. So there are songs that, even without the piano, which is the dominant sound if you’re playing in the black keys—why else would you play in that key except to have that dominant piano sound?— the songs that go into those keys right from the piano, they sound different. They sound deeper. Yeah. They sound deeper. Everything sounds deeper in those black keys. They’re not guitar keys, though. Guitar bands don’t usually like to play in those keys, which kind of gives me an idea, actually, of a couple of songs that could actually sound better in black keys.
ST: Do keys have different colors for you?
Dylan: Sure. Sure. [Softly] Sure.
ST: You’ve written some great A minor songs. I think of “One More Cup of Coffee”—
Dylan: Right. B minor might sound even better.
ST: How come?
Dylan: Well, it might sound better because you’re playing a lot of open chords if you’re playing in A minor. If you play in B minor, it will force you to play higher. And the chords . . . you’re bound, someplace along the line, because there are so many chords in that song, or seem to be anyway, you’re bound someplace along the line to come down to an open chord on the bottom. From B. You would hit E someplace along the line. Try it in B minor. [Laughs] Maybe it will be a hit for you. A hit is a number one song, isn’t it? Yeah.
ST: When you sit down to write a song, do you pick a key first that will fit a song? Or do you change keys while you’re writing?
Dylan: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe like in the middle of the thing. There are ways you can get out of whatever you’ve gotten into. You want to get out of it. It’s bad enough getting into it. But the thing to do as soon as you get into it is realize you must get out of it. And unless you get out of it quickly and effortlessly, there’s no use staying in it. It will just drag you down. You could be spending years writing the same song, telling the same story, doing the same thing. So once you involve yourself in it, once you accidentally have slipped into it, the thing is to get out. So your primary impulse is going to take you so far. But then you might think, well, you know, is this one of these things where it’s all just going to come? And then all of a sudden you start thinking. And when my mind starts thinking, “What’s happening now? Oh, there’s a story here,” and my mind starts to get into it, that’s trouble right away. That’s usually big trouble. And as far as never seeing this thing again. There’s a bunch of ways you can get out of that. You can make yourself get out of it by changing key. That’s one way. Just take the whole thing and change key, keeping the same melody. And see if that brings you any place. More times than not, that will take you down the road. You don’t want to be on a collision course. But that will take you down the road. Somewhere. And then if that fails, and that will run out, too, then you can always go back to where you were to start. It won’t work twice, it only works once. Then you go back to where you started. Yeah, because anything you do in A, it’s going to be a different song in G. While you’re writing it, anyway. There’s too many wide passing notes in G [on the guitar] not to influence your writing, unless you’re playing barre chords.
ST: Do you ever switch instruments, like from guitar to piano, while writing?
Dylan: Not so much that way. Although when it’s time to record something, for me, sometimes a song that has been written on piano with just lyrics here in my hand, it’ll be time to play it now on guitar. So it will come out differently. But it wouldn’t have influenced the writing of the song at all. Changing keys influences the writing of the song. Changing keys on the same instrument. For me, that works. I think for somebody else, the other thing works. Everything is different.
ST: I interviewed Pete
Seeger recently—
Dylan: He’s a great man, Pete Seeger.
ST: I agree. He said, “All songwriters are links in a chain.” Without your link in that chain, all of songwriting would have evolved much differently. You said how you brought folk music to rock music. Do you think that would have happened without you?
Dylan: Somebody else would have done it in some other kind of way. But, hey, so what? So what? You can lead people astray awfully easily. Would people have been better off? Sure. They would have found somebody else. Maybe different people would have found different people, and would have been influenced by different people.
ST: You brought the song to a new place. Is there still a new place to bring songs? Will they continue to evolve?
Dylan: [Pause] The evolution of song is like a snake with its tail in its mouth. That’s evolution. That’s what it is. As soon as you’re there, you find your tail.
ST: Would it be okay with you if I mentioned some lines from your songs out of context to see what response you might have to them?
Dylan: Sure. You can name anything you want to name, man.
ST: “I stand here looking at your yellow railroad / in the ruins of your balcony . . . [from “Absolutely Sweet Marie”]
Dylan: [Pause] Okay. That’s an old song. No, let’s say not even old. How old? Too old. It’s matured well. It’s like wine. Now, you know, look, that’s as complete as you can be. Every single letter in that line. It’s all true. On a literal and on an escapist level.
ST: And is it truth that adds so much resonance to it?
Dylan: Oh yeah, exactly. See, you can pull it apart and it’s like, “Yellow railroad?” Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All of it.
ST: “I was lying down in the reeds without any oxygen / I saw you in the wilderness among the men / I saw you drift into infinity and come back again . . .” [from “True Love Tends to Forget”]
Dylan: Those are probably lyrics left over from my songwriting days with Jacques Levy. To me, that’s what they sound like. Getting back to the yellow railroad, that could be from looking some place. Being a performer you travel the world. You’re not just looking off the same window every day. You’re not just walking down the same old street. So you must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don’t have to observe. It hits you. Like “yellow railroad” could have been a blinding day when the sun was bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed on my mind. These aren’t contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out. You know, if it’s in there it’s got to come out.
ST: “And the chains of the sea will be busted in the night . . .” [from “When the Ship Comes In”].
Dylan: To me, that song says a whole lot. Patti Labelle should do that. You know? You know, there again, that comes from hanging out at a lot of poetry gatherings. Those kind of images are very romantic. They’re very gothic and romantic at the same time. And they have a sweetness to it, also. So it’s a combination of a lot of different elements at the time. That’s not a contrived line. That’s not sitting down and writing a song. Those kind of songs, they just come out. They’re in you so they’ve got to come out.
ST: “Standing on the water casting your bread / while the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing . . .” [from “Jokerman”]
Dylan: [Blows small Peruvian flute] Which one is that again?
ST: That’s from “Jokerman.”
Dylan: That’s a song that got away from me. Lots of songs on that album [Infidels] got away from me. They just did.
ST: You mean in the writing?
Dylan: Yeah. They hung around too long. They were better before they were tampered with. Of course, it was me tampering with them. [Laughs] Yeah. That could have been a good song. It could’ve been.
ST: I think it’s tremendous.
Dylan: Oh, you do? It probably didn’t hold up for me because in my mind it had been written and rewritten and written again. One of those kinds of things.
ST: “But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency . . .” [from “Slow Train”]
Dylan: Now don’t tell me . . . wait . . . Is that “When You Gonna Wake Up”?
ST: No, that’s from “Slow Train.”
Dylan: Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Wow. There again. That’s a song that you could write a song to every line in the song. You could.
ST: Many of your songs are like that.
Dylan: Well, you know, that’s not good either. Not really. In the long run, it could have stood up better by maybe doing just that, maybe taking every line and making a song out of it. If somebody had the will power. But that line, there again, is an intellectual line. It’s a line, “Well, the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency,” that could be a lie. It just could be. Whereas “Standing under your yellow railroad,” that’s not a lie. To Woody Guthrie, see, the airwaves were sacred. And when he’d hear something false, it was on airwaves that were sacred to him. His songs weren’t false. Now we know the airwaves aren’t sacred but to him they were. So that influenced a lot of people with me coming up. Like, “You know, all those songs on the Hit Parade are just a bunch of shit, anyway.” It influenced me in the beginning when nobody had heard that. Nobody had heard that. You know, “If I give my heart to you, will you handle it with care?” Or “I’m getting sentimental over you.” Who gives a shit! It could be said in a grand way, and the performer could put the song across, but come on, that’s because he’s a great performer, not because it’s a great song. Woody was also a performer and songwriter. So a lot of us got caught up in that. There ain’t anything good on the radio. It doesn’t happen. Then, of course, the Beatles came along and kind of grabbed everybody by the throat. You were for them or against them. You were for them or you joined them, or whatever. Then everybody said, Oh, popular song ain’t so bad, and then everyone wanted to get on the radio. [Laughs] Before that it didn’t matter. My first records were never played on the radio. It was unheard of! Folk records weren’t played on the radio. You never heard them on the radio and nobody cared if they were on the radio. Going on into it further, after the Beatles came out and everybody from England, rock and roll still is an American thing. Folk music is not. Rock and roll is an American thing, it’s just all kind of twisted. But the English kind of threw it back, didn’t they? And they made everybody respect it once more. So everybody wanted to get on the radio. Now nobody even knows what radio is anymore. Nobody likes it that you talk to. Nobody listens to it. But, then again, it’s bigger than it ever was. But nobody knows how to really respond to it. Nobody can shut it off. [Laughs] You know? And people really aren’t sure whether they want to be on the radio or whether they don’t want to be on the radio. They might want to sell a lot of records, but people always did that. But being a folk performer, having hits, it wasn’t important. Whatever that has to do with anything . . . [Laughs]
ST: Your songs, like Woody’s, always have defied being pop entertainment. In your songs, like his, we know a real person is talking, with lines like “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.”
Dylan: That’s another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain’t there. That’s the best way. That’s the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it’s something to strive after.
ST: Until you record a song, no matter how heroic it is, it doesn’t really exist. Do you ever feel that?
Dylan: No. If it’s there, it exists.
ST: You once said that you only write about what’s true, what’s been proven to you, that you write about dreams but not fantasies.
Dylan: My songs really aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature. Waking up from a dream is . . . when you write a dream, it’s something you try to recollect and you’re never quite sure if you’re getting it right or not.
ST: You said your songs are responsive. Does life have to be in turmoil for songs to come?
Dylan: Well, to me, when you need them, they
appear. Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.
ST: Outside of life itself?
Dylan: No. Outside of the situation you find yourself in. There are different types of songs and they’re all called songs. But there are different types of songs just like there are different types of people, you know? There’s an infinite amount of different kinds, stemming from a common folk ballad verse to people who have classical training. And with classical training, of course, then you can just apply lyrics to classical training and get things going on in positions where you’ve never been in before. Modern twentieth century ears are the first ears to hear these kind of Broadway songs. There wasn’t anything like this. These are musical songs. These are done by people who know music first. And then lyrics. To me, Hank Williams is still the best songwriter.