A selection of Patti Smith’s favourite Bob Dylan songs
Patti Smith has never made any secret of her total and utter admiration for Bob Dylan. Long before Smith was the punk-poet pioneer she became, she was merely a tremendous fan of the folk legend. Now peers, having worked together before and repeatedly honoured each other’s careers, Smith’s adoration for Dylan only seems to grow.
In her bestselling memoir, Just Kids, Smith writes about living at the infamous Chelsea Hotel in New York City. In 1969 and 1970, Smith and the artist Robert Mapplethorpe occupied the hotel’s smallest room. Other residents at one point or another included the likes of Leonard Cohen, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, and one Bob Dylan.
Despite living at the hotel at different times, both writers existed in the same ecosystem of artists who had haunted its halls, past and present. That’s what led Dylan to take Smith by surprise as she looked into one of her earliest audiences and saw her idol.
Talking about the pre-fame show, a time when Smith was only beginning to merge her poetry with guitar, she recalls the moment, stating: “Somebody told us he was there. My heart was pounding,” she told Thurston Moore in an interview.
“I got instantly rebellious,” Smith continues. “I made a couple of references, a couple of oblique things to show I knew he was there. And then he came backstage, which was really quite gentlemanly of him. He came over to me, and I kept moving around. We were like two pit bulls, circling”. Under the pressure of her nervousness, Smith reacted in a way she would come to regret. “I was a snot-nose. I had a very high concentration of adrenaline,” she said. “He said to me, ‘Any poets around here?’ And I said, ‘I don’t like poetry anymore. Poetry sucks!’”
They say don’t meet your idols, but in Smith’s case, meeting her idol and making him laugh out of shock worked in her favour. Ever since, the pair have remained friends and fans of each other’s work. Dylan would go on to invite her to perform at one of his Rolling Thunder Revue shows, and Smith even performed a Dylan song when he won the Nobel Prize in 2016. Going back even further, before the pair had ever met, Smith penned a poem in his dedication, writing, “Have you seen Dylan’s dog… he’s the only thing allowed to look Dylan in the eye.”
It’s clear that Smith is a huge Dylan fan, maybe the biggest one there is. Having spoken about so many different Dylan songs in various different interviews, Smith’s playlist of her favourite tracks is constantly growing.
In 2021, on her Live At Electric Lady EP, Smith shared a stripped-back rendition of ‘One Too Many Mornings’. Introducing the track as “one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs”, she wishes him a happy birthday before diving into a beautiful cover of the 1964 country ballad.
At another time, Smith selected ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ as her favourite track. An epic seven-minute-long take on society and politics, sitting on Dylan’s pioneering first electric album, it’s easy to see why Smith would have a special love for this one.
Similarly, when asked to outline 40 songs that defined her life, she dedicates 14 tracks to Dylan. The entirety of his 1966 record Blonde On Blonde makes the list, with Smith saying: ”I love Blonde on Blonde and I remember listening to ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ a million times, just all Bob Dylan”. Later, when sharing her favourite Dylan love songs with Rolling Stone, Smith couldn’t boil the list down to anything less than 16 tracks.
In conversation with The Irish Times, Smith summed up her love for Dylan perfectly, stating: “I related completely to him. His arrogance, his humour, his mergence of poetry and performance.”
Below, we’ve collated a number of Smiths’ favourite Dylan songs from various interviews.
Patti Smith’s favourite Bob Dylan songs:
- ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Pledging My Time’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Visions of Johanna’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘I Want You’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Just Like a Woman’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Temporary Like Achilles’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘4th Time Around’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Obviously 5 Believers’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘One Too Many Mornings’
- ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’
- ‘Ballad in Plain D’
- ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’
- ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’
- ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue’
- ‘Wedding Song’
- ‘Dark Eyes’
- ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
- ‘Not Dark Yet’
- ‘Isis’
- ‘Dirge’
- ‘She Belongs to Me’
- ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’
- ‘Visions of Johanna’
- ‘Nettie Moore
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