Three lyricists Bob Dylan thinks were a level above: “Greatest genius”
Songwriting is an elusive art which, as we have seen countless times over the course of music history, is certainly not for everybody. Yet, some figures seem to emerge onto the airwaves with a natural gift for concocting prose, and Bob Dylan is undoubtedly among those figures.
Across the musical landscape, there aren’t many modern-day songwriters who do not owe a core part of their craft to the progenitive genius of Dylan. When the folk hero first emerged from his Minnesota origins onto the ramshackle stages of Greenwich Village folk clubs back in the 1960s, he managed to capture the spirit of the era like no other, and his talents only seemed to expand with every passing record, pretty quickly establishing Dylan among America’s all-time greatest songwriters.
Given the length and breadth of Dylan’s discography, though, stretching across half a century and incorporating everything from old-school American folk to his brief gospel period, it is difficult to highlight any true contemporaries of the songwriter.
Of course, there were figures like Joan Baez with whom he shared stages back in his 1960s heyday, along with a litany of other figures who emerged in Dylan’s wake, but truthfully, there are only a handful of figures who can rival the power, endurance, and genius of the songwriter’s extensive output.
Luckily, for those studying Dylan’s own views on his various contemporaries – or lack thereof – he had never really shied away from discussing his own influences and adorations. In the countless interviews and collaborations that the songwriter has amassed during his illustrious career, the same few names seem to crop up more than most when it comes to discussing his own favourite songwriters.
Randy Newman is one such subject of Dylan’s admiration, repeatedly voicing his deep-rooted appreciation for the often underrated nature of the Californian’s body of work. During one chat with Paul Zollo back in 1991, Dylan admitted, “Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that.”
However, he went on, “He’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art.”
“Not that many people in Randy’s class,” Dylan concluded. If he were pushed to list the various songwriters who might be put in that very same class, though, it wouldn’t take a detective to deduce who he might select. Leonard Cohen, for instance, received a seemingly constant stream of support from Dylan throughout his legendary tenure.
Cohen is perhaps the only other songwriter who could have rivalled Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature win, having amassed a truly incredible collection of pulchritudinous poetry that, in many ways, went beyond the realm of songwriting. For Dylan, though, the appeal of the Canadian songwriter lay in an often underrated aspect of his output.
“When people talk about Leonard,” Dylan told The New Yorker in 2016. “They fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines—they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs.”
Dylan went on to add, “As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.” High praise indeed.
Completing Dylan’s holy trinity of songwriting excellence is, of course, John Prine, whose country-folk genius saw him become one of the most influential yet routinely overlooked songwriters of the 20th century. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan once declared in a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post. “Midwestern mindtrips to the Nth degree. And he writes beautiful song.”
“I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene,” the songwriter went on, harking back to Prine’s early emergence back in the 1970s and his distinct blend of humour and profound political commentary. “All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone’ the soldier junkie daddy and ‘Donald and Lydia’ where people make love from miles away,” Dylan recalled. “Nobody but Prine could write like that.”
In many ways, these three songwriters that Dylan adored so much are telling of his own musical sensibilities. After all, each of the three is radically different from one another, as well as being out of step with the musical mainstream, too, content with doing things their own way and carving out their own space for songwriting excellence.
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