Credit: Bent Rej

The artist Bob Dylan called the “great genius” of melody in modern music

Sun 3 May 2026 18:00, UK

When people talk about Bob Dylan, the word genius quickly comes up. It has been a Dylan-attached buzzword for about as long as the man himself has been in the spotlight, as Joan Baez put it in ‘Diamonds and Rust’, “you burst on the scene already a legend.”

While there is no denying that the folk-star turned rock rebel deserves the label after his decades of contribution and immeasurable influence on songwriters everywhere, Dylan himself seems fascinated by it. Always one to shy away from public attention, denying interviews and littering his biography with lies as a kind of shrouding defence mechanism, his discomfort with the world’s obsession with him has long been documented.

But when he does allow the world in, it’s never himself he wants to talk about. Instead, so much of his public address is devoted to talking about other people – namely, other musicians.

Rather than delivering the follow-up to his somewhat-memoir, Chronicles, he instead released The Philosophy of Modern Song, more a piece of music journalism as he unpacks songs and artists and their legacy, wandering through the history of music to stop off at certain milestones.

Clearly feeling like the attention is all too often concentrated on him, there is an effort to disperse it onto the people he believes deserve it – people like Leonard Cohen.

Up there in the god tier of the greats, Cohen obviously sits there alongside Dylan. Both going from the folk crowd of the Greenwich Village scene to world-renowned respect, the two songwriters have now become what feels like completely essential references for any guitar-slinging songwriter.

As a novelist and poet as well as a songwriter, it’s Cohen’s lyricism his most often revered for. Much like Dylan, a Cohen song is rich in metaphors and imagery, though his come with a more candid, humorous undertone a lot of the time. Cohen’s writing is a masterclass in that delicious balance between wit and grandeur, writing love songs on high but then throwing in something sleazy and silly for good measure. Overwhelmingly, when the Canadian artist’s praises are sung, they’re sung for his words.

Dylan wants to change that, though. “When people talk about Leonard,” he said, “they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius.” Recalled by journalist Paul Zollo from an interview he did with Dylan, he recounted how the legend was determined to get more people to pay attention to Cohen’s music beyond the lyrics and focus on how great and interesting his melodies were.

“Even the counterpoint lines—they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs,” he said, passionate about the song’s textures and Cohen’s interesting musical decisions that took a great song and made it godly.

To Dylan, this was the reason why Cohen was one of the greats. “As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music,” he said, granting him the complex G-word he’s always struggled with as he added, “His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres.”