The song Bob Dylan thought only he could sing: “It stands up when you hear it played by me”
If anyone even thinks about covering a Bob Dylan song, they better have a damn good reason.
Dylan has written the kind of songbook that almost no other artist can manage to touch, and even if he didn’t have the greatest voice in the world, the hymns that he gave to rock and roll have been a blueprint for what good songwriting should sound like. But even with the stellar renditions that other artists have done, Dylan knew to keep a few of the best tracks for himself whenever he played.
Then again, it makes sense why a handful of his tunes are so malleable when being sung by another artist. Adele did a superb job singing ‘Make You Feel My Love’, but the idea of a lover wanting to do everything they can to make sure that their other half is happy is the kind of universal desperation that anyone can find themselves in.
But Dylan didn’t start that way, either. There was certainly a love of emotion tied to many of his greatest tunes in the early days, but you couldn’t really say he was wearing his heart on his sleeve all the time. A few of his tunes would be whimsical, but when he got serious, it had more to do with teaching people a lesson. The world was changing rapidly, and while he didn’t want to tell people how to live their lives, he did at least provide a mirror so they could see what the rest of the world was doing.
But around the late 1960s, there was a bit more of a change in him. The love songs like ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ started to feel a lot more personal, and when looking through his later records like Blood on the Tracks, he wasn’t afraid to bleed for his audience, even if it meant getting a little too close for comfort when singing tunes like ‘Idiot Wind’ or ‘Buckets of Rain’.
Once he started coming out of his born-again period in the 1980s, though, it took him a while to pick things back up again. He was looking to stretch himself again when working on records like with the Traveling Wilburys, but when crafting an album like Oh Mercy, he knew that some of the tracks were bound to go over well only because of the kind of spin that he could put on it.
A lot of the reason why the record works comes down to people like Daniel Lanois behind the scenes, but Dylan felt tracks like ‘Ring Them Bells’ lived and died on the strength of his performance, saying, “It stands up when you hear it played by me. But if another performer did it, you might find that it probably wouldn’t have as much to do with bells as what the title proclaims. Somebody once came and sang it in my dressing room. To try to influence me to sing it that night. It went out the door and didn’t come back. There was no way he was going to get me to sing it like that.”
And even though Dylan’s not doing anything too sophisticated with the melody or anything ike that, the important parts are what he doesn’t add to the tune. Any other singer would have gladly played a song straight from back to front, but Dylan has the ability of talking out of both sides of his mouth and making it all make sense, and a song like this doesn’t need perfect vocal cadence to sound great.
There are still the lingering leftovers from his born-again period, but his calls out to people like St Peter is half the reason why it works. Anyone else can cry out in pain to a higher power, but only the writer of the tune has the ability to take the music to places that true professionals couldn’t capture.
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