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How does Joan Baez feel about Bob Dylan now?

Sun 9 February 2025 2:00, UK

The complex connection between Joan Baez and Bob Dylan spans decades. In the early 1960s, Baez shared her spotlight with a new artist, helping to launch Dylan into the folk world and then dominating it together with their regular duets. But through affairs, secret marriages, fall outs, make-ups and tours, there is a lot of water running under their bridge. As A Complete Unknow reignites intrigue into their love, how to Baez feel about Dylan now?

When the pair first met, they were mutually enamoured. In awe of each other’s talent, it was their shared love of music and using their voice for something good that drew them together. “She had that heart-stopping soprano voice, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” Dylan said about Baez. “I was just stoned on that talent,” Baez said in return as she spent years supporting and loving him, even as he underappreciated her.

Things got messy when Dylan got famous; he would admit to that. “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately, she got swept up along, and I felt very bad about it,” he said, adding, “I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.” Baez felt the same as she said, “I kind of got lost in the shuffle,” but the initial breakdown of their relationship was also muddied by other things, like Dylan turning his back on protest music and his secret marriage to Sara Lowndes in 1965.

Stinging from being left behind, Dylan also seemed to mourn the ease of their early connection. They spent years communicating back and forth through their songs. They also stayed in an on-and-off connection for years as they went on tour together, fell out, made up and toured again, wrote more songs, and then the other wrote a song in reaction, and so on.

By the 1980s, the connection was so strained and so painful that they cut ties. In 1984, Baez left their tour early, writing that moment in her biography: “You mean sing?” He replied: “Yeah, do sumpin’ together.” Naturally, Baez refused: “Naw, I don’t think so, Bob. Not that way. I wanted to do it right, you know, but it didn’t work out. Maybe some other time. I gotta go.”

And that was that. That was the end. For a long time, it was a bitter end as Baez harboured hurt and upset towards the folk star’s treatment of her.

Joan Baez’s opinion of Bob Dylan today?

“I have a new reaction how when people say ‘What about Bob Dylan?’” Baez told AXS TV in 2025, stating that her feelings towards him have recently shifted to a more positive place. “It is such an honour to have been a part of his life and to share that music and to have loved him and even liked him. Thats a recent change for me cause i was still hanging onto old stuff,” she said.

It’s said that the pair have never reconnected in person and that they still have no real contact. But Baez found healing in an indirect way. “I started painting and doing commissions, and the first two commissions were for Bob Dylan,” she said, “So I’m painting, and I thought, okay, I’ll start listening to the music, and I just took a walk on the wild side with that music, and I thought, that’s too great.”

Finding peace with the past through appreciating the music, Baez concluded, “That talent is too great to have any resentment, or anything other than a wholehearted feeling of caring and gratefulness.”