The 1970s singer Bob Dylan called a great melodic genius: “No one else comes close”
There’s no sense in anyone trying to compete with anything Bob Dylan created.
He didn’t want to be one of the greatest songwriters in the world, but given his track record, the best that he could do was still miles ahead of what everyone else was doing in the rock and roll world at the time. But even to this day, a lot of Dylan’s greatest muses weren’t always the greatest musicians in the world. He loved the folk singers, but he was also interested in the poetry behind all great rock and roll.
Because when you look at some of his best friends, a lot of the people he hung out with were all poets. He wanted to know how people like Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs created some of their greatest work, and since he was already halfway to being a legend, you could hear him slowly starting to twist his own musical style when he started to incorporate his electric guitar into the mix.
Him going electric may have pissed off a fair bit of people, but Dylan wasn’t looking to be stagnant, either. He could change his lyrical flow every single time he sang, but he also wanted the chance to make tunes that could hit people in their gut, and that means making the music a little bit louder. Dylan had birthed a new generation of writers when he spoke, but no one was expecting how many people would start copying him outright.
Even though The Byrds made an entire career out of taking the pieces of what Dylan did and turning them into jangle pop, there were always people like Barry McGuire going the extra mile to sound like him. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was a much purer social statement than ‘Eve of Destruction’ could ever be, but even among the imitators, Dylan was convinced that no one seemed to have a better handle on what songs were meant to be better than Leonard Cohen.
Cohen wasn’t going to be making the catchiest tunes of all time, but when you look at those first few albums, his greatest strength was putting you in an environment whenever he sang. There’s very little going on in the mix of a song like ‘Suzanne’, but when you hear him talking about this woman that has such a gripping effect on you, it’s almost like you can see a picture of her in your head before the song is even finished. That’s what Dylan was after, and he was even more impressed by what Cohen could do with his melodies.
Compared to the more extravagant singers in rock and roll, Dylan was much more interested in seeing what Cohen could do whenever he structured the melody around every single word he sang, saying, “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines – they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.”
And that’s the reason why a song like ‘Hallelujah’ resonates so much, no matter what decade you’re in. The different lines weave together so well whenever he’s singing, and if you know anything about music theory, hearing him talk about the harmonic structure of the song he’s singing and equating it to the struggle that David had when playing his music before God is one of the most ingenious metaphors that anyone has ever made in popular song.
Sometimes it takes a talent like Jeff Buckley to remind everyone why those songs resonate so much, but that doesn’t take away from Cohen’s craftsmanship every time he plays. Whereas Dylan’s message songs had the potential to hit you over the head the minute that you heard them, Cohen’s songs seemed to break your heart in two and put it back together before you even realised what hit you.
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