The song Bob Dylan described as “too much and not enough”
When it was announced that a Bob Dylan biopic was in the works, many question marks popped up for Dylan fans. He’s not just a singer/songwriter; he’s an artist with a strange mystery surrounding him. His creative impact doesn’t just resonate in music but can be felt in literature, sound, and the written word in general. How do you put that into a movie that does the man justice?
The mystery that encapsulates Bob Dylan resonates in everything about his artistry. His songs were an honest reflection of the world at the start of his career, but the meaning behind some of his vocals became much more obscure as time went on.
Equally, his live performance was also something draped in mystique. He didn’t just play through his pieces one by one; he acknowledged them with a passing glance. A chord can be a homage to a track; the mere existence of the songs is enough to warrant the celebration, and whatever way the show manages to acknowledge them is enough.
This mystery and the adoption of a fanbase willing to accept that Bob Dylan could borderline do whatever he wanted occasionally led to some creative confusion on his part. He wanted to embrace the side of him that loves innovation and unique music, as well as his inner poet, who had already touched the lives of so many. However, these two factors occasionally rubbed shoulders, creating elongated songs that dragged.
He was no stranger to having lots of verses in his work, but sometimes, when he wrote like this, it came across as long-winded. Ever the self-critic, Bob Dylan was aware of how some of his pieces went on for too long, but he also didn’t know how he could embrace his love for creativity in a way that didn’t produce songs like that.
One track in particular that stood out to him was ‘Precious Angel’ from the record Slow Train Comin’. “That’s another one; it could go on forever,” he said. “There’s too many verses, and there’s not enough.”
Dylan continued, “When people ask me, ‘How come you don’t sing that song anymore?’ It’s like it’s another one of those songs: It’s just too much and not enough. A lot of my songs strike me that way. That’s the natural thing about them to me. It’s too hard to wonder why about them. To me, they’re not worthy of wondering why about them. They’re songs. They’re not written in stone. They’re on plastic.”
It makes sense for Bob Dylan to trust his instinct, given his natural writing and musical ability had already done so much for his career. In doing so, he embraced that some of his songs wouldn’t work; if they didn’t, they were never meant to. That’s precisely what happened with ‘Precious Angel’.
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