Elvis Costello picks the best songs from his favourite Bob Dylan albums
After breaking out as the voice of an unsettled youth in the early 1960s with protest folk classics like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Masters of War’, Bob Dylan began to reinvent himself. The artist’s first significant stylistic overhaul came in 1965 when he released his first folk-rock album, Bringing It All Back Home, which waved a final goodbye to acoustic folk on Side Two and dipped its toes into electric rock on Side One.
Folk purists at the 1965 Newport festival were outraged, and Dylan’s “going electric” stunt hit the press with a negative spin. However, this was just the beginning of the artist’s most critically praised era. Between 1965 and ‘66, Dylan followed up Bringing It All Back Home with Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, consolidating his position as the decade’s most consummate and influential songwriter.
At the time, Dylan would argue that his embrace of folk-rock was a natural progression, inevitable given his childhood infatuation with heroes such as Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Over time, he developed his style to include various inflexions in the folk-rock tradition, maintaining poetic lyricism as the strongest string to his bow. Still, he would later recognise the mid-1960s as a bountiful period he struggled to top.
One of Dylan’s favourites of his own catalogue from this period was ‘It’s Alright Ma Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, though he admits that it intimidated his older self. “I don’t think I could sit down now and write ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ again,” Dylan admitted in a 1980 interview. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but I can still sing it.”
“I’ve written some songs that I look at, and they just give me a sense of awe,” he added in a 1997 interview with The New York Times. “Stuff like, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, just the alliteration in that blows me away.”
We hear you, Bob. It appears that such a degree of lyrical creativity suits a certain age of creative enlightenment. In Dylan’s case, his restless mind fell under the spell of Beat Generation writers, especially that of Allen Ginsberg, whom he befriended at the end of 1963. In turn, Dylan’s work inspired an entire generation of culturally transformative songwriters, including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and many, many more.
Emerging to prominence in the late 1970s, backed by his band The Attractions, Elvis Costello cut his teeth as a new wave artist with hits like ‘Pump It Up’ bringing the punk style to the wider audience. Costello’s associative style at this point was notably propulsive and pop-conscious, but there was nuance in his lyrics, for he had learned from some of the very best.
In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, Costello discussed some of his most crucial songwriting influences, honouring revered artists like Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and The Beatles. Featuring most prominently, however, was Bob Dylan.
While listing 500 albums “you need”, Costello also picked out his favourite song from each. Of his 500 selections, nine were Dylan LPs. Explaining his selection process, Costello admitted that some of the albums were inconsistent, while others he recommended as a consistent and essential body of work.
He exemplified this using Dylan’s uneven 1981 album, Shot of Love. “[It] may not be your favourite Bob Dylan record, but it might contain his best song: ‘Every Grain of Sand’,” Costello said. “Other albums are like sets of chairs. You can’t break them up.”
Even Dylan himself has admitted to losing his lyrical mojo to an extent over the decades, but each decade, he’ll release an album or two with an indispensable song. Costello seems to have found most of these gems, with ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and ‘Not Dark Yet’ being two of the songwriter’s greatest compositions since 1980.
See Costello’s list of Bob Dylan selections and follow our playlist below.
Elvis Costello’s favourite Bob Dylan albums:
- Bringing It All Back Home – ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’
- Blonde on Blonde – ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’
- John Wesley Harding – ‘All Along the Watchtower’
- Planet Waves – ‘Dirge’
- Blood on the Tracks – ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’
- The Basement Tapes – ‘Nothing Was Delivered’
- Shot of Love – ‘Every Grain of Sand’
- Time out of Mind – ‘Not Dark Yet’
- Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert – Like a Rolling Stone’ & ‘I Don’t Believe You’
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