Recommendations of the Editorial team
The best songwriters of all time, 1st place: Bob Dylan
Its appearance should change the popular music forever. Nobody should put the latte higher, nobody has a greater influence. “You want to write songs that are Bigger Than Life,” wrote Bob Dylan in his “Chronicles”. “You want to write about unusual experiences you have experienced, about unusual things you have seen.” And so Bob Dylan became the most important songwriter of all time.
Dylan made no difference between the present and the historically guaranteed past. A book about the American Civil War was able to help him understand the sixties. What made it possible for him to dig out old folk ballads and to electrified so far that they highlighted a lightly on the present.
Bob Dylan – “Like a Rolling Stone”:
Early songs like “Blowin ‘in the Wind” initially only delivered hits for other interpreters (such as Peter, Paul & Mary or Stevie Wonder), but already drove the competition from the Beatles to Johnny Cash to intensify their own ambitions. But then Dylan also rolled up the charts and delivered prophetic music that pop music had never heard: “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Positive Fourth Street”, “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”.
Dreams are something like foreign countries that you have to discover for yourself
He might change his person’s shirt like other people, but songs such as “Tangled Up In Blue”, “Knockin ‘on Heaven’s Door” or “Forever Young” should always leave a sustainable impression on the respective generations.
Even in old age, there are no limits to his creativity: “Love and Theft” from 2000 led him back to the male sound of his electrical youth and marked a renaissance that is still not complete.
“A song is like a dream that you want to make you want to come,” he wrote. “Dreams are something like foreign countries that you have to discover for yourself.” Which we always like to do.