Credit: Far Out / Bent Rej / Heinrich Klaffs

The only Bob Dylan songs Robert Plant ever needed to know: “Moved some minds and mountains”

Sat 18 April 2026 18:00, UK

While narrowing down one’s favourite Bob Dylan material to just one song, let alone one album, is a near-impossible task, you have to bear in mind just what it is that makes the songwriter so special.

You could argue that stylistically, Dylan was far from being unique, but that the structural simplicity of his work was the most appealing thing about what he came up with, and that this allowed other facets of his artistry to shine.

You could also make a case for the fact that he wasn’t necessarily the greatest performer either, and that his whiny vocals are perhaps one of the more off-putting features of his songs. However, the fact that many others have managed to cover his songs and transform them into masterpieces of their own ought to highlight just how good the songs had to be in the first place, and if Dylan hadn’t written an absolute marvel like ‘All Along The Watchtower’, then Jimi Hendrix wouldn’t have had a song to toy with and make his own.

It should also go without saying that having a unique delivery can take you a long way in making you stand out from the crowd, and Dylan certainly did that with his husky tones, regardless of whether they were always able to hit the notes in the most auditorily pleasing manner.

However, what most people tend to look at is his lyrical genius and the fact that he was able to tap into culturally and socially conscious topics that related to the period he was writing in. What Dylan did better than virtually all of his contemporaries was weave new narratives out of these topics, while also warning the listener about the way things were going to go if they didn’t act quick enough upon the ways in which they were slowly driving themselves towards catastrophe or armageddon.

While this list of Dylan’s strengths as a songwriter may not help narrow down the task of picking a favourite song, Robert Plant attempted to pick out two of his own in a feature for Mojo, claiming that the finest moments in Dylan’s discography were tracks that essentially packed in all of these features and utilised them to sublime effect.

Speaking about ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’, Plant claimed that he fell in love with the lyrics of the song upon first listen, quoting “Some time ago a crazy dream came to me / Dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three,” and “I drove 42nd Street in my Cadillac / Good car to drive after a war,” as being two of his standout moments in the song.

Plant continued: “For a guy who wanted to be in The Teddy Bears with Phil Spector, he’s certainly moved some minds and mountains, hasn’t he? I’ve got his autobiography, but I don’t want to read it. I read something about him being a piece of work who lied and danced with Mimi Farina a bit too often. I thought, I don’t need to know this; I just need to know ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.”

While both of these are early works of his taken from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it just goes to show how unstoppable he was even at the start of his career, and that he was always going to be destined to become one of the most celebrated songwriters of a generation if he continued in this vein. Both ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ still stand up when pitted against his later works, and if that’s not enough proof of him being an impeccable songwriter, then perhaps you don’t deserve to be blessed with an artist as unique and inspiring as Dylan.