The song Bob Dylan said could “go on forever”
“Art is never finished, only abandoned,” is a quote dubiously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, but whether the renaissance hero ever actually said it or not, it certainly rings true within the discography of an artist like Bob Dylan, whose work has always been in a perpetual state of evolution.
During Dylan’s early years in New York, as a devotee of the folk scene, he built his reputation on the back of interpretations and versions of age-old folk songs, passed down through the generations. Even when he betrayed his folk brethren, embracing electricity at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he always maintained his ability to reinterpret and reimagine songs.
Take ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, for instance. Despite being one of Dylan’s defining anthems, the track has gone through countless changes over the years, particularly when performed live in concert. He has never been an artist content with regurgitation, and his countless different interpretations of the 1965 classic is a key example of that fact.
As a constantly evolving artist, after all, the songwriter cannot keep regurgitating a song he wrote six decades ago unchanged. WIth the passing of years, virtually every song performed by Dylan has been redefined, extended, or rewritten to match whatever his current sensibilities are. Although that practice has historically alienated a lot of the performer’s concertgoers, eager to hear Dylan’s greatest hits as they were originally recorded all those years ago, it certainly keeps his artistic spirit alive.
At the same time, though, Dylan’s discography is far too extensive for him to feasibly rewrite and reinterpret the entirety of his repertoire – particularly when that repertoire is still expanding with new material. He might be one of the greatest songwriters to ever grace the airwaves, but he is not superhuman, and he isn’t blessed with unlimited time. Sometimes, then, leaving a song as is seems to be the only logical solution.
One such track is ‘Precious Angel’, his gospel love song epic from 1979’s Slow Train Coming. Despite lasting for six and a half minutes, Dylan has affirmed that the song could have been much longer, if given the time. “That’s another one, it could go on forever,” he told Song Talk in 1991. “There’s too many verses and there’s not enough. You know?”
“When people ask me, ‘How come you don’t sing that song anymore?’ It’s like it’s another one of those songs: it’s just too much and not enough,” the songwriter continued. Rather than torturing himself with endless rewrites and extensions, Dylan made the understandable decision to simply leave the song be.
“A lot of my songs strike me that way,” he said. “That’s the natural thing about them to me. It’s too hard to wonder why about them. To me, they’re not worthy of wondering why about them. They’re songs. They’re not written in stone. They’re on plastic.”
That quote seems to sum up Dylan’s entire attitude towards his musical output: nothing is sacred, and everything can be changed and rewritten to suit whatever his prevailing artistic desire is at that moment. Without that inherent manifesto, Dylan might have resigned himself to being a ‘greatest hits’ type performer many decades ago.
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