“Once was enough”: Bob Dylan on the album he could never write again
Any songwriter needs to look at their body of work in certain waves. Although someone might like the idea of making chart toppers until the sun burns out of the sky, that can only happen for so long before people start getting bored and want to move on to something different that might not fit the traditional three-minute pop single. While Bob Dylan was one of the few artists who had the pop charts come to him, even he had to admit that he couldn’t keep playing the same type of music forever.
Despite David Bowie being looked at as one of the true genre chameleons throughout his career, Dylan may be just as much of a shapeshifter. He had some moments where he was known as one of the greatest rockstars of his time, but someone only sampling an album like Highway 61 Revisited is going to be missing out on the folk albums like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or even the heartache he put into Blood on the Tracks.
Ever since the Never Ending Tour began in the 1980s, Dylan has been focused on making albums that serve as bookmarks for where he was at the time. Even if he has had a severe change in his vocal style over the years, hearing tracks from Time Out of Mind come out in that throaty tone makes him sound like he’s finally reached that world-worn drifter persona that he had talked about back in the day.
As much as Dylan liked the idea of writing what was in his heart, though, there was no sharper pivot for fans than when he went electric. From the minute ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ started, people were ready to cast Dylan as a sellout who decided to cash into the corporate side of music and prostitute himself for the mainstream market. If any of them had listened to Bringing It All Back Home, they should have seen that coming.
Dylan’s fifth album was already an odd beast by experimenting with electric instruments, but hearing him play songs like ‘Gates of Eden’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ felt like omens that he had done everything he could with the folksy side of his music. It was time to move on, but Dylan admitted later that he had moved on a few more times since.
Despite still having his writing chops, the wordsmith felt that he would never be able to write an album that blunt ever again, saying, “[They] were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I have done it once, and once was enough.”
Given how straightforward he could be, it also might be for the best that he never went back to this kind of sound. Everyone might have fond memories of the first time they heard a song like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ but the minute that you walk out of that sonic headspace, it’s easy to realise why Dylan wanted out, almost like he had a foot in both worlds and didn’t want to spend time serving both of his audiences in equal measure.
It might be disheartening knowing that he has no desire to recreate a song like ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ but it’s probably for the best that Dylan moves on to whatever his next venture is going to be. Because if he had kept playing that style of folk-rock for the rest of his life, we would never have seen what he would do with The Traveling Wilburys or how he grew into the kind of writer who can make something like ‘Murder Most Foul.’
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