The 1981 song that arrived to Bob Dylan as if by magic: “Coming from somewhere else”
Songwriting can be a thankless task. Artists can spend weeks trying to write to no avail, desperately searching for a drop of inspiration to fall out of the sky. Other times, the song arrives at a musician effortlessly, a fortunate moment which happened to Bob Dylan with his classic track, ‘Every Grain Of Sand’.
The song first appeared on Dylan’s 1981 album, Shot Of Love. The record was written a few years after the singer-songwriter had become a born-again Christian, dramatically affecting him as a person and artistically. Mainly, his work during this period flattered to deceive and was largely uninspiring. However, that damning analysis doesn’t apply to the timelessly impressive ‘Every Grain Of Sand’.
Part of what makes the song so extraordinary is how it manages to transcend the divisive nature of Dylan’s religious period altogether.
While many of the tracks from his born-again era were explicitly devotional and occasionally heavy-handed, ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ feels far more universal in its meditation on doubt, redemption and human fragility. The spiritual imagery is still present, but it is delivered with the poetic ambiguity and emotional subtlety that defined Dylan’s finest songwriting throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The story behind its recording also reinforces the long-held mythology surrounding Dylan as an artist capable of tapping into inspiration almost instinctively. Across his career, some of his greatest songs have seemed to arrive fully formed in fleeting bursts of creativity rather than through laborious refinement.
‘Every Grain Of Sand’ stands among the clearest examples of that phenomenon, capturing a moment where performance, lyricism and emotion aligned perfectly in real time, never needing to be recreated or improved upon afterwards.
The Shot Of Love closing song is the type of track that most artists spend their entire careers trying to create, and Dylan didn’t even have to pour effort into the writing process. During an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Bono once said it’s the one Bob Dylan song he couldn’t live without, and many share the U2 frontman’s stance.
In the liner notes of Biograph, Dylan revealed the secret behind the classic track: “That was an inspired song that came to me. I felt like I was just putting down words that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out.”
While this sounds far-fetched and borderline ridiculous, his producer Chuck Plotkin later supported Dylan’s claim. He recalled to Uncut: “Bob had been playing guitar, but he suddenly moved over to the piano, sat down and began to play. Now, the piano was mic’d, but there was no vocal mic at the piano, it just wasn’t set up, because Bob hadn’t been playing piano. And I realised, you know – this is not a guy who wants to even think about going through the business of doing, like, seven takes. Forget seven takes. Once he’s got the words right; that’s your take. He’s an artist, but he’s not a recording artist, it’s just not what he does.”
Plotkin continued: “And so he started to play, and I didn’t want to stop him. He’s playing something I’ve never heard before. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, I grabbed hold of the mic from the stand where he’d been previously been playing guitar and singing, and I basically turned myself into a mic stand. I literally held the microphone up, tried to find a physically comfortable enough position so that I was not in his way, and that I could still manage to hold my arm out there for however long this song was going to take”.
He added: “And it was ‘Every Grain Of Sand’! And I’m standing there, hearing this for the first time, and the song kills me. I think it’s one of his great, great songs – and I’m hearing it for the first time while standing beside him imitating a mic stand as best I can. And that was it. That was the version we heard on the record.”
Thankfully, Plotkin was on hand to ensure this magical moment of inspiration from above was recorded on tape. In all likelihood, if Dylan attempted a million more takes, he’d never recreate the brilliance of the original recording, which appeared on Shot Of Love.
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