Bob Dylan on the modern singer he considered perfect: “Nothing I don’t like”
It’s usually easy for any legacy artist to become a bit of a curmudgeon in later life. Even though modern artists might see people like Neil Young as influences on their sound, there’s a good chance that he’s not going to take the time to do a duet with someone to simply cash a paycheck. Anyone who’s been in the industry long enough usually wants to be left the hell alone, but Bob Dylan still knew that there was some new blood in the scene even up into the 2000s.
Then again, the new millennium had already done a number on the songwriting legend even before he put out anything. Time Out Of Mind may have been one of his late-career revivals, but the fact that he had to go into surgery not long after the album was released left him a bit incapacitated by the time he started working on records like Love and Theft.
When people got to hear the Dylan of the modern age, he wasn’t exactly the wise guy who seemed to know everything as he did back in the 1960s. Since the album was taken in during the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of the songs took on a new meaning by everyone who listens to them, with Dylan painting the picture of someone who is somewhat lost in the modern age and wondering whether there’s still room for him in the cultural conversation.
But Dylan’s flavour of rock and roll had taken a nosedive in popularity over the years. There were still legacy acts that were carrying the torch for singer-songwriters like Tom Petty and Don Henley, but outside of those working in the alternative country sphere like Wilco or Ryan Adams, most of the charts were being dominated by bands like Linkin Park or Blink-182, who weren’t exactly going to be making ‘Like A Rolling Stone‘.
Outside of strictly rock and roll, though, R&B was going through a bit of a resurgence. D’Angelo had already kicked off the decade by blessing listeners with Voodoo, but when Alicia Keys first started out, people were blown away. She could already dominate the musical landscape on piano, but her smokey voice on tracks like ‘Fallin’ are still some of the most enduring songs of the decade.
Even though Dylan seemed like the kind of person who didn’t even bother listening to the radio past 2001, he never heard a bad note come out of Keys when he first heard her perform, saying when promoting the album Modern Times, “I remember seeing her on the Grammys. I think I was on the show with her. I didn’t meet her or anything. But I said to myself, ‘There’s nothing about that girl that I don’t like.’”
While the world probably didn’t need to hear a duet between Dylan and Keys in this lifetime, he did think enough of her to put her into the lyrics of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’. Even though he talks about how he couldn’t keep from crying when listening to her, it might have been because he heard something a little too close to home whenever her tunes started.
Because at the heart of his material, Dylan wasn’t only a poet with a shoddy voice. Everything that he sang had to come from his soul before anything else, and whenever listening to Keys sing, most people would swear that she never sang anything that she didn’t believe in.
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