Credit: Far Out / Bob Dylan

The artist Bob Dylan wanted to write “100 songs” with

Thu 16 April 2026 20:30, UK

Bob Dylan doesn’t really seem like the kind of person who really needs a co-writer to work with him on every single song.

This is the same person who wrote the greatest music of the 20th century, and while there are plenty of artists who would kill to learn a thing or two from him, the idea of offering up your own ideas to a songwriting master like that isn’t something that anyone would take lightly. But Dylan has always thrived from challenging people’s expectations, and sometimes the best way to mess with some heads is to bring in someone nobody would have expected.

Granted, it’s not like Dylan didn’t understand what his audience wanted in some respect. He had his head screwed on enough to realise that a collaboration between him and a band like The Chainsmokers probably wouldn’t work in the modern age or anything, but he was at least open to people who had the right idea. And when you look at all of his favourite friends from around that time, not all of them were musicians.

He was one of the greatest voices of his time, but a lot of the people he looked up to were poets. Since they don’t have to add music to their songs, some of the best wordsmiths are the ones who could put the most specific feelings into words in a way that no one else could when they recite their work, but Dylan just so happened to have a guitar strapped on when he was delivering his masterpieces.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some fantastic poets in the industry. Despite getting off to a rocky start with Dylan, Patti Smith is one of the finest poets in rock and roll history, and while Elton John was a fantastic example of a pure tunesmith, Bernie Taupin was the one putting little pictures in the minds of every single listener when he wrote his lyrics, even if not all of them made sense.

But when working with Robert Hunter on Together Through Life, Dylan had found a pure confidante when they fed lines off each other. Hunter had already been known for making the Grateful Dead’s biggest hits sound so great, and since Dylan was known to create vivid pictures at this point in his career, he felt like Hunter was speaking his language a lot better than anyone else could.

Compared to the one-off songs that Dylan wrote with the Traveling Wilburys, he felt that he could have easily kept the streak going with Hunter for as long as he wanted to, saying, “Hunter is an old buddy. We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there.. He’s got a way with words, and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.”

This kind of music wasn’t going to get Dylan back in the charts or anything, but the way they constructed most of their tunes wasn’t all that different from the kind of writing he had been doing. Time Out of Mind took a much more rambling approach than what he had done in the past, and while not everything on Together Through Life was exactly perfect, you could see him still trying to find that one line no one had found yet with Hunter.

And judging by how he would be working on his songs years later, chances are ‘Murder Most Foul’ got written because of the lessons that Dylan learned from working with Hunter. It’s one thing to write from experience every single time you make a record, but sometimes you need to see someone else’s creativity at work to see what you can bring to every one of your tunes.