Bent Rej photographs Bob Dylan in Denmark, 1966

Credit: Far Out / Bent Rej

The three songwriters Bob Dylan felt were out of his league:

Sat 29 November 2025 20:55, UK

There’s an old saying that folk is ‘four chords and the truth’. Bob Dylan eclipsed that. He twisted that core mantra with irony, humour, heart, a spooky prescience, and a whole host more as he became the most original artist of the 1960s simply by being himself, whoever that was.

He traversed the very spectrums of music that we hold today to create a unique proposition that both beguiled and transfixed an audience that would not only age along with the star but also swell in size with every passing year. Dylan is as timeless as the wind, and his ability to blow through generations is largely compounded by his lyricism.

No songwriter, before or since, has done what he has with his words. Though there are some songwriters who have dabbled with the sincere lyricism that set him apart, during his first burst into the collective consciousness, Dylan was unmatched.

However, there have been times in his career when even the most ardent Dylan fans would agree that he, as he puts it himself, ”lost his power and dominion over the spirits.” He adds: ”I had it once, and once was enough.” Dylan has come back from the brink more times than the star in a bad action movie, and in many ways, the troughs in his work are the product of the same greatness that produces the pinnacles, but there are troughs all the same.

As Randy Newman commented, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he did on those first two records. The tremendous praise that the last two have gotten, I’m not so sure [that would have happened] if they didn’t have his name on it.” By ”first two”, he surely means first ten, but nevertheless, in 1997, Dylan did indeed know that he wasn’t perhaps at his most profound.

Bob Dylan - 1965 - London - Royal Albert Hall — Credit: Far Out / Alamy

And that was fine by him. He was happy to work his way through the waxes and wanes of creativity, no doubt buoyed by the fact that he is among the greatest artists to have walked this realm and pen more straightforward songs. He commented: “These songs are not allegorical. I have given that up… Philosophical dogma doesn’t interest me.“

He then put this down to a shortcoming that even existed at his peak: he’s not necessarily a natural songwriter. He bemoans three of his heroes that he feels he could never stack up to in this naturalistic sense. ”I don’t consider myself a songwriter in the sense of Townes Van Zandt or Randy Newman,” he told USA Today. ”I’m not Paul Simon. I can’t do that. My songs come out of folk music and early rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s it. I’m not a classical lyricist, I’m not a meticulous lyricist. I don’t write melodies that are clever or catchy. It’s all very traditionally documented.”

When he was firing, he felt his way of wrangling a masterpiece overcame this, but in leaner spells, he had to get creative in another sense. ”I’m under the impression that people aren’t really paying attention to my records,” he said. ”I’m aware that I don’t sell records like I did in the ’80s or the ’70s, and that’s OK as long as I can play, and the right crowd is going to come and see it properly. I don’t follow what records are at the top of the charts. I ceased doing that a long, long time ago.”

In truth, if anything, this just shows that part of Dylan’s genius is his humility. The phrase ‘different strokes for different folks’ comes to mind because while Dylan might have bemoaned the fact he felt he wasn’t a seamless songwriter in the classical sense, Paul Simon was equally peeved that he wasn’t blessed with Dylan’s ability to twist the form, opining: “One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere. I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. I sound sincere every time.”

Dylan may well be the greatest, but even the best can find spots of humility, and Dylan surely has that as he picked out three songwriters whom he felt were just a touch out of his league. Every so often, at least.