The songs that proved to Bob Dylan there was a God: “The highest form of song is prayer”
“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music,” Bach once said. Or how about Cat Stevens who said, “Music is part of God’s universe.” Leonard Cohen sang of music as one big “hallelujah”, and to Bob Dylan, with his own complex relationship to religion, songs are hymns.
“I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere,” Dylan said in 1976. In the late 1970s, Dylan went through what people call his Christian phase as for a few years, everything turned towards religion. His music suddenly sang of it, he spoke of it in interviews, and for a period of time, he seemed complete and utterly devout.
“In the fury of the moment I can see the master’s hand / In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand,” he sang in 1981 as at that point, tracks like ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ were basically hymns. Dylan was writing songs about God, but really, both before and after this phase, God was always present in music for him, just in a more covert way.
“The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the earth. It must be wonderful to be God,” he said as if the whole world was constantly singing up to some being in the sky, and he was there trying to choose what station to tune into.
But beyond the more outright religious songs, Dylan seemed to find confirmation of some higher power simply in the beauty of a good tune and the talent of those who made it. Similar to the call of a coyote, as if something had crafted it to sound so moving, he assumed that surely the gift of songwriting and the ability to write something incredible must have come from above.
“All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain’ to‘Keep on the Sunny Side’”, he said in a 1997 interview, picking out two classic folk songs as examples. Though by then he claimed to prescribe to no one religion, he still found spirituality in a good song, or moral lessons that felt like gospel. “I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs,” he said, as if tunes were the clearest sign of a higher power he could think of.
“I believe in Hank Williams singing `I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light, too,” he said, perhaps not placing Williams on the same ranking of God, but at least appearing to see the singer as a kind of proof, as if talent like that cannot be earthy or come about without some divine intervention allowing it to be so.
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