The one musician Phil Collins and Bob Dylan both called the greatest: “Still love”
The entire appeal of both Bob Dylan and Phil Collins feels like two separate worlds half the time.
Even when Collins did end up doing his own version of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, the entire reason why his voice works was because of his knowledge of harmony compared to Dylan’s more basic setup when singing the original version of the tune. But just because they were separated by genre, singing style, and even musical complexity half the time, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some common ground for both of them to find, either.
Some of their best songs were all about trying to make a comment on the human condition, but what makes them both great is how simple their melodies were. ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ does need to be studied over too much to sing along, nor did Collins need to incorporate every single strange prog rock fill he ever heard for people to understand what a song like ‘Sussudio’ was supposed to sound like.
They were all at least trying to write the same kinds of musical juggernauts that their heroes did, but there was always a lot more for them to explore as well. They didn’t want to be limited by just a bunch of the same chords every single time they played, and when you look through a lot of their greatest tunes, you can see them trying their best to twist around their style slightly to keep everything fresh.
Collins was never afraid to throw in some soulful music here and there on his albums, and while Dylan wasn’t going to go through any drastic career switches or anything, he definitely had a lot more to work with when he discovered open tunings and started utilising that on albums like Blood on the Tracks. Every one of those experiments opened new doors for them, and that came from listening to what Brian Wilson did with The Beach Boys every time he sang.
The California rockers had a resident genius in their ranks whenever they performed, and while Collins had his own sound, he never took all of those classic songs for granted when discussing records like Holland, saying, “One forgets about The Beach Boys sometimes, the amount of great songs that Brian Wilson wrote, you know. But this album, Holland, that this song comes from has got a lot of good songs on it. It appeared when they were on hip, you know.”
There were certain records that Collins tended to dip in and out of when it came to Wilson’s work, but from a purely sonic perspective, Dylan knew that there was no one else that even came close to what Wilson could come up with at the piano, saying, “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”
If you look at where pop music has gone since then as well, it’s not like Dylan is exactly wrong, either. Some of the finest rock and roll songs ever made came from Wilson’s head, and even if he never claimed to take credit for the songs in any technical sense, there was some otherworldly force that he grasped onto every single he worked on a record like Pet Sounds or individual songs like ‘Surf’s Up’.
No one in music was doing anything like that, and if his music was good enough to give The Beatles a run for their money, he was clearly working with something much bigger than anyone anticipated. There was no one that could touch him whenever he sat down with an idea, and given how many classic tunes he had in his system, Wilson will most likely be talked about in 100 years’ time the same way that everyone else talks about Beethoven and Mozart today.
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