“I would have never dreamed of myself”: the one thing Bob Dylan said Billy Joel did better
Bob Dylan’s songs have been covered endlessly. Everyone—from huge-name artists to the singer at your local karaoke bar—has had a go, with some versions faring better than others. If Dylan personally responded to each one, he’d never have time to drawl his way through ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ at his occasional live shows. However, when it came to Billy Joel’s cover, he felt compelled to respond.
There are a few instances where Dylan has given his reaction to another artist’s take on his song. “It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them,” Dylan said about Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, even going so far as to say, “He probably improved upon it.”
“Elvis Presley recorded a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most,” he said about the time when The King took on his song, ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’. Other artists like Alanis Morrissette, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Joan Baez, and a few lucky others also got a seal of approval from the musician himself.
Billy Joel joined that privileged class after covering ‘Make You Feel My Love’. Technically, Joel released it first. His version came in August 1997, while Dylan’s trailed behind in September. But really, it was Joel’s cover that turned Dylan’s opinion on his own song, making him decide to put his own out.
“I wasn’t sure what was going to be on this record and what was not going to be on this record. Billy had heard this song, and at that time, I wasn’t really positive one way or another whether it was going to be included, so I might as well let Billy do it,” Dylan explained about how the cover came along. Not entirely sold on the worth of his love ballad and unsure if he’d ever use it for anything, he handed it off to someone else.
But the common thread that runs through so many of the covers Dylan loves most is that Joel seemed to reinvent the song somehow or find something in it that the artist that wrote it had never accessed. “He got something out of that song I would have never dreamed of myself,” he said.
“Billy Joel’s a very dynamic artist, and he can hear things in a song because he’s also a songwriter. He managed to probably convey that song in a different way than me,” he explained. Like his love for Hendrix, finding new elements in the track and reworking it through his own musical mind, Dylan’s appreciation for Joel’s cover reminds him of the power of a good song to exist in different forms for different people.
“That’s what happens when you write a song; somebody can definitely interpret it a different way than the person who wrote it,” he concluded.
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