The genres Bob Dylan was always more comfortable with: “That’s what I’m best at”
Different songwriters have different approaches to songwriting. When I interviewed Graham Nash, he said that he took his inspiration from Nina Simone and some advice that she had given during her life.
Naturally, Nash is famous for writing political tracks, and through different presidential administrations, moments in time, periods of protest, there has been some form of his track to accompany them. A lot of them still apply today, as tracks that centre around racism, immigration and social injustice carry themes that continue to resonate.
“One of the things I realise is just how relevant, even today, even this morning, some of those songs are that I wrote 50 years ago,” said Nash (we spoke on the morning of ICE protests), “I mean immigration, even this morning, they’re still bitching about how Trump is, you know, getting rid of people that aren’t white. [Regarding] ‘Military Madness’, there’s still wars going on, certainly between Ukraine and the Soviet Union, and what’s going on in other parts of the world. You know, even a song like ‘Chicago’ and ‘We Can Change the World’, I still believe we can.”
When discussing his writing process, he spoke about advice that Simone passed on, when she said that an artist’s job is to hold a mirror up to the world around them. Since then, Nash has always been intent on making music that is a reflection of everything happening in his life at that moment, be it political or personal.
“I really still think every day about a quote by Nina Simone, who said, ‘Every artist, whether you’re a songwriter or a piano player or a sculptor or a painter, you have to reflect the times in which we live’,” he recounted.
This has been a common trend, long before Simone started making music, let alone passing on her wisdom, and Bob Dylan is another artist who has always used his music to talk about both his emotional state, saying that the genres of folk and blues were heavily inspired by real-world events, which could be seen in the reaction to the Titanic sinking. Not only did this massive incident show Dylan how much music could be a reflection of the times that people were living in, but it also helped him understand why he was drawn to the music he wound up playing.
“Folk musicians, blues musicians did write a lot of songs about the Titanic,” he said, “That’s what I feel that I’m best at, being a folk musician or a blues musician, so in my mind it’s there to be done. If you’re a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the Titanic, because that’s the bar you have to pass.”
Dylan certainly has a point. Throughout the past century, these are the genres which have acted as the most honest reflections of a certain period. There’s no exact science as to why this is, but it’s likely to do with the romanticism of their sound. Both genres are those which can be elevated by the way somebody plays or sings, which means that emotion, be it anger, disdain, heartbreak, or mourning, can be packaged into this music better than any other style of music on the planet.
Dylan puts that emotion into everything he writes, which is why he thrives the best in those two genres. Regardless of whether it’s someone in 1912 writing about the Titanic or Bob Dylan in the ‘60s writing about political injustice, these are the best styles of music to rely on.
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