PJ Harvey once identified the one trait that made Bob Dylan “a master”
Music is among the most subjective art forms out there, but if there is one thing that seemingly everyone can agree on, from the folk devotees of the 1960s to the alt-rock heroes of the 1990s, then it’s the fact that Bob Dylan is a genius – and quite rightly so.
Unlike countless artistic visionaries throughout history, Bob Dylan has never really had to fight to have his genius recognised. Pretty soon after he emerged from the dingy folk clubs of Greenwich Village, he was already being hailed among America’s greatest songwriters, during a period which was particularly bursting with revolutionary musical talent. From behind his dark sunglasses, Dylan wasted no time in leaving his mark on the cultural landscape of the US, inspiring and changing the lives of countless contemporaries in the process.
Although those early days in the 1960s were groundbreaking enough, the real power of Dylan’s work has always been his innate ability to adapt and diversify his output, remaining wholly dedicated to his artistic principles. When Self Portrait came out in 1970, audiences were torn between confusion and outrage, but Dylan himself could stand firm in the fact that he did exactly what he wanted to.
In that sense, it doesn’t take a contortionist to connect the works of Bob Dylan with PJ Harvey, another artist who has always been devoted to a sense of artistic integrity and doing things her own way. It should come as no real surprise, therefore, that Harvey – like everybody else – is a dedicated devotee of Dylan’s, repeatedly drawing inspiration from the music and writing of the Minnesota-born folk hero. Much like Dylan, Harvey has never been an artist content with staying in one place for too long.
Also like Dylan, Harvey has always imbued her work with a knack for poetry. Although songwriters and poets definitely have some degree of overlap in the Venn Diagram of the music industry, they harbour a very different skillset. It takes a very special kind of artist to be able to pull off both art forms as beautifully as somebody like Dylan, and for PJ Harvey, that forms the basis of her adoration for the Bard of Greenwich.
“There are very few artists that can do both music and poetry really well,” Harvey affirmed during a 2023 interview with The New Yorker, before name-dropping everybody’s favourite Scottish poet. “Robert Burns was one of the few that could write brilliant songs and brilliant poems. In order for some of these poems to become songs, the lyrics had to be greatly simplified, because the music is doing so much,” she explained.
Comparing any modern musician to the nation-defining work of ‘Oor Rabbie’ runs the risk of being a particularly egregious stretch, but if anybody is going to fill that space, then it’s Bob Dylan. “You don’t need a lot of dense language in a song,” Harvey continued. “It’s quite off-putting, I find, to have too much dense language in a song—unless you’re a master, like Bob Dylan.”
Whereas minimalism is key to a lot of poetry and songwriting, Bob Dylan is something of an outlier, packing his writing with all the fruits of his literary arsenal. While Harvey was self-affacing enough not to include herself in that particular quote, her own work hardly strays away from dense language, and she tends to pull it off with an effortless sense of grace.
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