The Bob Dylan song Bruce Springsteen called a masterpiece: “I love it all”
Bruce Springsteen has always been as much of a poet as he is a rock star. Despite being known as one of the fixtures of American culture for his blue-collar work ethic and nonstop need to tour, every song ‘The Boss’ has ever released is as beautiful as a piece of prose when you strip back all of the musical window dressing. Anyone who has even tried to be poetic in rock has to get in from somewhere, and Springsteen thought that Bob Dylan was still making musical works of art in his later years.
But did you really need some random person on the Internet to tell you that Springsteen was influenced by Bob Dylan? Probably not. Considering how much of his lyrics follow complex stories with mythological pieces of melodrama to them, Springsteen seemed to be a version of Dylan, who sang in tune and had a kickass band behind him in his early years.
If Springsteen was all about ripping off Dylan, though, we wouldn’t be talking about him with such hushed reverence today. Whereas Dylan was looking to teach people a lesson in some of his songs, Springsteen painted vivid pictures of what life in everyday America looked like, either through the heartache that everyone faces trying to achieve their dreams or managing to escape their lives for the unknown.
By the time he had started working on albums like Nebraska, you weren’t going to mistake Springsteen for anyone else. Since Dylan was still on his high horse after undergoing a born-again Christian-style conversion, Springsteen was digging deep into his soul to make songs that reflected the dark side of life a little clearer.
Springsteen might have matured into his own brand of songwriter by the 1990s, but Dylan helped teach him how to age gracefully as a rock star. From Time Out of Mind onward, Dylan was used to making songs like a craftsman, leaning into his husky baritone voice on ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and even helping people get over grief on records like Love and Theft and Modern Times.
Of all the newer songs Dylan has made, Springsteen still thinks he had that same revolutionary energy on his epic ‘Murder Most Foul’, telling Jann Wenner, “I love it all. I like Modern Times and Rough and Rowdy Ways. That’s tremendous writing and playing, and the production on them are terrific. ‘Murder Most Foul’ is a masterpiece, a real classic Dylan masterpiece. To come along with that at 80 years old, that’s pretty damn impressive.”
It’s not like Dylan tried to phone it in when it came to the track, either. Being one of the longest songs on any of his albums, Dylan takes the listener on a journey surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, with each verse being a bold exploration of how the world has changed and even grown colder as a result of him being murdered that hot Texas afternoon.
There are hints of Springsteen’s influence on Dylan as well, almost taking the same historical angle ‘The Boss’ had used when putting together records like The Rising. Whereas most artists would try to hand in any old song that they have in the pipeline at Dylan’s age, ‘Murder Most Foul’ is an example of the wiser poet taking all of those years and putting them into one track.
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