The 1966 hit Bob Dylan called “the best song I ever wrote”
Bob Dylan didn’t really need to be the person to toot his own horn about his own music.
There were already plenty of people who were trying their best to call him a musical prophet every single time he made a new record, and while that did make him uncomfortable from time to time, he did have the songs to back it up whenever he made a new record. He was still in the business to make a statement, but the real search that he was on usually centred around finding that one perfect song.
Because when you think about it, that’s all any songwriter should want to do. No one gets into the business trying to be merely acceptable at their craft, and every one of Dylan’s lyrics is about looking at his song from every angle until he feels like he has something good to work with. It’s hard work half the time, but when you listen to his records, every lyric comes at the best time that you could want it.
Most people might not know what they’re listening to when they hear his sandpaper voice for the first time, but a lot of his greatest songs serve to be musical journeys all on their own. No one would have expected that he would have been going electric, but when listening to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, every single line seems like him picking a fight with someone who had tried to go against the grain the same way he did.
He wasn’t afraid to make songs that challenged what everyone expected out of him, but by Blonde on Blonde, he was deconstructing everything about his sound. The double album is one of the most fully fleshed out records that he ever made, and when you look at the way that it unfolds, you’re getting a little bit of every piece of Dylan that anyone could have asked for back in the day.
‘Rainy Day Women’ is still considered one of the best songs of his career, but there’s a lot more depth to what Dylan was getting at on these songs. He wanted the chance for people to hear him for who he truly was, and while that did mean that he took a few jabs here and there, ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ was where everything reached a climax, and he did what he did best: write great stories.
Not every part of the song needed to be poured over or anything, but when looking at the lyrics, Dylan was painting with words better than he had ever done before, going so far as to call the song “the best song I ever wrote”, explaining, “Now that is religious music! That is religious carnival music. I just got that real old-time religious carnival sound there, didn’t I?” It wasn’t exactly psychedelic or anything, but you could feel what Dylan was going for.
This is the kind of epic poem that he had been writing for years at a time, and when looking at the rest of his career, he would keep trying to do the exact same thing. He didn’t care about song length after a while, and tunes like ‘Highlands’ and ‘Murder Most Foul’ abide by the same principles by giving listeners the best kind of epic story that any songwriter would have hoped to tackle.
It’s not an easy thing to pull off, and even Dylan has a few songs where he doesn’t, but in ‘Sad Eyed Lady’, he knew that he had something no one else did. This was the kind of record that stood alone in his discography, and no matter what he did afterwards, no one could take this tune away from him if they tried.
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