The 100 best songs of the Bob Dylan
Future generations of artists will also be inspired by Bob Dylan’s work. From the protest anthems of the 1960s, which made him a star, to his noir -like masterpieces of the nineties and, moreover, no other contemporary songwriter has created such an extensive and profound work. Songs that feel incredibly old and yet incredibly modern. Here, with comments from Bono, Mick Jagger, Lenny Kravitz, Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow and other famous fans, the 100 biggest songs by Dylan. Only the tip of the iceberg for an artist in his caliber. [Diese Liste erschien ursprünglich in einer Sonderausgabe von 2015]
100. “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” (1978)
Dylan said this confusing and yet haunting country rock epic was inspired by a man he saw on a train journey from Mexico to San Diego. “He must have been 150 years old. His eyes burned, and smoke came from his nostrils.” Sounds hard. But hey. At least the man Bob Dylan met.
99. “John Wesley Harding” (1967)
“I wanted to write a ballad,” said Dylan Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone. “Just like one of these old cowboy songs. You already know. A really long ballad.” Instead, the title song of his album in 1967 was an exciting parabola about the morale of lawless.
John Wesley Hardin was a villain from the late 19th century. But Dylan’s summoning of a “friend of the poor” who “never caused a honest person” is less about a certain figure than the appreciation of a rough American past that suited the root’s turn that took up his music. Recorded in Nashville with the drummer Kenny Buttrey and the bass player Charlie McCoy, it is a masterpiece ascetic idealism.
98. “Corrina, Corrina” (1963)
“Corrina, Corrina” is an early example of Dylan’s ability to classify folk music in a wider pop tradition and vice versa. The song was a blues and country standard with various titles for decades, which was recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Chet Atkins, Big Joe Turner and the Teenager Crooner Ray Peterson. Mostly as a funny dance melody.
Dylan interprets him as a dark, pastoral ballad. And adds an allusion to Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway”, which deepens his feeling of love -sick exhaustion. But as tender as “Corrina” was, he also indicates his rock-‘n ‘roll heart. It is one of the first songs on a Dylan plate on which drums can be heard.
97. “Where are you tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)” (1978)
The last title on a Dylan album is often a kind of preview of his next album. Note how “i’ll be your baby tonight” from “John Wesley Harding” is a trailer for the country sound from Nashville Skyline. The elegant “Where are you tonight?” Ends “Street Legal” by predicting conversion to Christianity, which began in 1979 with “Slow Train Coming”. “I couldn’t tell her my private thoughts,” Dylan sings, worried that his wife cannot follow him in his “new day at daybreak”.
He had reached a point that only a few fans had ever predicted.
96. “Farewell, Angelina” (1991)
This Outtake from “Bringing It All Back Home” contains some of Dylan’s most impressive texts. An accumulation of pictures. Dancing elves underneath. King Kong. Squinting pirates. 52 gypsies. A heaven that “flooded”. And the fully, the “nailing time bombs to the pointers of the clock”. But it is also a beautifully sung farewell song to a girl. And maybe also on Dylan’s more literal songwriting style from his folk era.
It is probably based on the Scottish folk song “Farewell to Tarwathie” and is primarily known as a cover version of Joan Baez. In addition to the lyrical flights, Dylan added a melody to the original, which is as threatening as it is comforting.
95. “On a night like this” (1974)
This song opens “Planet Waves” – his reunification with the band – with an exuberant, happy note. Driven by a galloping rhythm and a Cantina accordion accompaniment, Dylan sounds so lively that he can hardly speak clearly. Especially when he asks his lover to “cook some coffee powder”.
“On a night like this” conjures up the scene of a snow-covered hut and reminds of both the “Basement Tapes” days in the state of New York, as Dylan and the band still seemed able to explore every corner of American music. “We have a lot to discuss/and to remember a lot,” he sings. It may have been a short -lived reunification. But it was a nice one.
94. “Highlands” (1997)
Many of Dylan’s largest albums end with an epic that occupies the entire side of a record. “Highlands” is the most epic of all. Over the course of 16 minutes, Dylan talks to a waitress, ordered soft cooked eggs, mentions Erica Jong and Neil Young and complains that life will pass him. “All the young men with their young women who look so good,” he sings.
“Well, I would immediately exchange with each of them if I could.” He was only 56 years old when Time Out of Mind appeared, but the fear of death runs through the album like a thread. Dylan claimed that “Highlands” is based on a reef of Charlie Patton, but nobody found a reef that even sounds near.
93. “Pay in Blood” (2012)
Dylan said he had intended to record his first religious album for years before he went to Jackson Brownes Studio in LA in early 2012. Instead, he started with “Tempest” in the sixth decade of his career. A brutally intensive album that is permeated by a specific American form of violence and tragedy. “Pay in Blood” is boastful and murderous. Dylan cruel poison spits over a reef in the style of the Stones from the “exile” era.
“I’m Drink My Fill and Sleep Alone/I Pay in Blood But Not My Own.” He could be a slave holder, a gunfire or a politician. “This is called tradition,” Dylan told Rolling Stone when he described the album. “And I deal with that.”
92. “Going, Going, Gone” (1974)
Despite all the myths that surround Dylan’s cooperation with the band, he actually only recorded one album with them. “Planet Waves” was recorded in 1973 in four hectic days in Los Angeles. And ranges from light, lively pieces such as “You Angel You” to the dark, aptly titled “Dirge”. The highlight of the album, “Going, Going, Gone”, is a tired, elegant hint of suicide that is musically full of life.
Robbie Robertson’s guitar game was never more precise. Garth Hudson’s organ exudes church beauty. Dylan’s singing has a rough urgency for which he needed several take to get it right. In a rejected version, he even used singing over dubs for the first time in his career.
91. “You’re a big girl Now” (1975)
Is there a more desperate moment of lovesickness in Dylan’s entire discography than the point in this jewel from “Blood on the Tracks”, where he sings: “I can change, i swear” (“I can change, I swear”) and then howle like a wounded dog? Maybe only later in the same song. When he speaks of “pain that stops and starts again like a corkscrew in my heart”.
Dylan’s breathtaking first attempt, the quiet New York Outtake, which is contained on “Biographer”, sounds injured. But here the pain is even sharper. “I read that this is about my wife,” Dylan wrote in the Liner Notes about “Biographer”, hoping to clarify the matter. “I don’t write confessional songs … it only seems that Laurence is Olivier Hamlet.”