The song Bob Dylan wrote as a theme tune: “I wanted to write a big song”
For the most part, Bob Dylan’s lyrics are difficult to pick apart. While we can hazard an educated guess about what he might be insinuating, many of his words are delicately hand-picked in a way that warrants multiple interpretations. For one song in particular, however, dusting off the magnifying glass might not be essential.
Discovering Dylan for the first time is like stumbling across gold dust. His lyrics hold up even today, probably even more so, as society becomes more and more divided into facets that so desperately believe their experiences to be the ultimate truth. Even The Who’s Pete Townsend once said Dylan’s music would “one day change the world, change the function of the song, and make a billion dollars”.
Dylan makes no effort to hold the key to all of the world’s most sought-after answers, but he takes his experiences and the parts of the world he observes and admires and attempts to make sense of them, even when they make no sense at all. The beauty of all of this, too, is the fact that his thoughts and opinions are ever-evolving, adapting as he glides through generations.
While many of his lyrics are dense and complex with various musings, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” was Dylan’s deliberate attempt at creating a song that reflected the nature of change. Unlike some of his broader, less restricted streams of consciousness, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ was rigid with purpose as a means of making a grand statement.
In the liner notes to compilation box set Biograph, Dylan once attempted to pinpoint his thought process, saying the song stemmed from the desire to write something “big” that seemed like “a theme song with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way”. He added that he “knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to” with a desire to tap into the civil rights movement and the folk music movement, which were both “pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.”
Although it’s since been hailed the archetypal protest song, it’s important to remember Dylan’s position at the time – these were two major cornerstones of social change in the mid-1960s, and to give a voice to public rallying cry was a major touchstone. Many of the lyrics in the song may appear broad, and the arrangements play into typical folk sensibilities, but the depth and sentiment it held, and continues to hold, was immensely significant.
Clearly, Dylan felt a responsibility to soundtrack the times even when he didn’t know the best approach. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Dylan’s nonchalance when approached by biographer Clinton Heylin, who once recalled stumbling across some lyrics written on some paper in Dylan’s apartment. After asking him what they meant, Dylan shrugged and said: “Well, you know, it seems to be what the people want to hear”.
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