It took Bob Dylan half a century to appreciate his “unthinkable” 1971 masterpiece
Let’s not beat about the bush: Bob Dylan can be a strange creature, and that’s when he’s having a good day.
The simple fact of the matter is that the man is unknowable, in every sense of the word. You can never quite predict or expect what he’s going to do next, whether that be releasing a new album, changing up the entire sound that he’s come to live and die by, or just keep touring on his long, warbling, never-ending stints on the road.
Sometimes, of course, there can be a combination of all three, or, as of most recently, only the one, but the point in all of this remains that Dylan treats his own mind like an ivory tower, and it’s increasingly difficult for anyone to even get a glimpse of it. This means that in the rare moments when he does let his guard down, it’s like a magician telling his deepest, darkest secrets.
By the same token, it’s also the case that Dylan is only human, and in the instances where he has seemingly plucked one of his most obscure deep cuts from nowhere and brought it back into his regular live repertoire, it’s often just that he’s forgotten about an old song and suddenly rediscovered it.
Take ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ as a prime example. The irony of the title and the track’s themes wasn’t lost when Dylan rediscovered his affection for the song, bringing it back to his live shows in the late 2010s after leaving it to gather dust for almost half a century.
When a reporter for The New York Times told him that the song had grown on him during a 2020 interview, Dylan explained his change of heart, “It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first-rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable.”
You couldn’t expect a plain answer about him trawling through his back catalogues and finding it again, could you? Instead, Dylan had to linguistically live up to the calibre that only painting a masterpiece could evoke. “That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context,” he continued, “In saying that, though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then?“
He wryly concludes, “Well, obviously, you have to paint another masterpiece.”
If there ever was a statement on a postcard as to what sums Dylan up the most, it likely would be that. He has gone through life knowing that he has created masterwork after masterwork, leaving a trail of chaos in his wake as people pine to know how he does it. For him, he seemed to imply a pressure of meeting expectations, but also a quiet satisfaction that he does what he wants anyway.
After all, the reality is that the songwriter isn’t inherently interested in writing masterpieces. He’s simply creating songs based on the world as he knows it, and how everybody else responds to that is for them to decide. Making classic song after classic song becomes boring, at the end of the day; sometimes, you’ve got to spice things up a bit.
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