Författare: Glenn Fosbraey Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Scien

He may never have strayed far from the minds of many music fans, but with his biopic A Complete Unknown hitting UK cinemas on January 17 and heartthrob Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, Bob Dylan may be about to gain an entirely new audience.

Considered by many to be the greatest songwriter of all time, Dylan’s influence on music can’t be understated. His voice, however, has divided listeners over the decades. Some find it “mesmeric” and others have likened it to that of “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”.

Despite having, as a researcher of songwriting, something of a penchant for Dylan’s idiosyncratic and character-filled style, here are six covers of his songs which I believe outperform his versions.

1. Girl from the North Country by Eels

Girl from the North Country first appeared on Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But it featured again on Nashville Skyline in 1969 as a duet with Johnny Cash. That version has been praised for the skip and groove of the acoustic guitar performances and how Dylan and Cash’s vocals are instinctive and spontaneous.

Another view would be that the guitars are out of time and the vocals are under-rehearsed – and the same shortcomings are on display during the song’s performance on the Johnny Cash show. Far superior in my humble opinion is the 2005 version by alt-rock band Eels.

Girl from the North Country by Eels.

The band performed the song for their Eels with Strings: Live at Town Hall DVD and album. Band leader Mark Everett switched it from acoustic guitar to piano. His gentle arpeggiated playing complemented his gruff yet tender vocals and drew every drop of emotion out of the lyrics and melody. He keeps in time, too.

2. Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds

A masterclass in lyric writing, Mr Tambourine Man (1965) saw Dylan flexing his linguistic muscles to reel off dozens of intricate internal and end rhymes, including my personal favourite:

Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sandVanished from my handLeft me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping.

The Byrds’ version, released in the same year and hitting number one in both the US and the UK, isn’t better than the brilliant original (how could it be?) but it is brilliantly different.

The Byrds’ version of Mr Tambourine Man.

Abridging Dylan’s version in order to make for a more palatable running time for the singles market, what it lacks in lyrics it more than makes up for in melody. The harmonies in the chorus add to Dylan’s main vocal line. It was an era-defining moment that launched the folk-rock genre.

3. All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Dylan may have released the original version of All Along The Watchtower on his John Wesley Harding album in 1967, but it was The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s cover, released just six months later, which has largely been accepted as the definitive recording.

All Along the Watchtower performed by Jimi Hendrix.

Taking Dylan’s gentle acoustic guitar and harmonica number and feeding it through his legendary white Strat, Hendrix rocks seven shades of summer out of the song until it takes on a completely new life.

So great was his reinterpretation (it seems derisive to merely label it a “cover”) that as well as being ranked at number 40 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, Dylan amended the song’s structure for later live performances in order for it to be more like Hendrix’s.

4. If Not For You by George Harrison

Granted, I only heard Dylan’s recording of If Not For You after already being familiar with George Harrison’s version included on his 1970 album All Things Must Pass for several years, so it was always going to feel slightly foreign to me.

George Harrison performs If Not For You.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how unimpressive and strangely flat it seems compared to Harrison’s recording. Dylan’s run-together vocal lines were backed by oddly jaunty and accented side-stick drumming (with the snare struck on the second beat but then a quaver before the fourth instead of on the fourth itself) and punctuated with glockenspiel. It all adds up to a slightly confused and messy arrangement, which takes attention away from the sincerity of the lyrics.

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5. If Not For You by Olivia Newton John

When Olivia Newton-John issued her own cover of If Not For You in 1971, she wisely opted for the same arrangement as Harrison’s, thankfully, minus Phil Spector’s muddy over-production – and scored an international hit with it in the process.

If Not For You performed by Olivia Newton John.

To my mind If Not For You remains one of Dylan’s most simplistic, beautiful songs – so long as he’s not singing it.

6. Ballad of Hollis Brown by David Lynch

Appearing on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), Dylan presents the five-minute Ballad of Hollis Brown as its title suggests, as a traditional ballad in both form and theme. His voice is backed by a lone acoustic guitar, minus even his ever-present harmonica.

The Ballad of Hollis Brown by David Lynch.

Nearly half a century later, director David Lynch took time out from his day job to reimagine the song as drum-heavy claustrophobia, twisting the original until it would have been unrecognisable if not for its title and lyrics. Dylan diehards may want to give this one a miss, but for those of us who enjoyed the music from the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks series three, this is a winner. Läs mer…

He may never have strayed far from the minds of many music fans, but with his biopic A Complete Unknown hitting UK cinemas on January 17 and heartthrob Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, Bob Dylan may be about to gain an entirely new audience.

Considered by many to be the greatest songwriter of all time, Dylan’s influence on music can’t be understated. His voice, however, has divided listeners over the decades. Some find it “mesmeric” and others have likened it to that of “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”.

Despite having, as a researcher of songwriting, something of a penchant for Dylan’s idiosyncratic and character-filled style, here are six covers of his songs which I believe outperform his versions.

1. Girl from the North Country by Eels

Girl from the North Country first appeared on Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But it featured again on Nashville Skyline in 1969 as a duet with Johnny Cash. That version has been praised for the skip and groove of the acoustic guitar performances and how Dylan and Cash’s vocals are instinctive and spontaneous.

Another view would be that the guitars are out of time and the vocals are under-rehearsed – and the same shortcomings are on display during the song’s performance on the Johnny Cash show. Far superior in my humble opinion is the 2005 version by alt-rock band Eels.

Girl from the North Country by Eels.

The band performed the song for their Eels with Strings: Live at Town Hall DVD and album. Band leader Mark Everett switched it from acoustic guitar to piano. His gentle arpeggiated playing complemented his gruff yet tender vocals and drew every drop of emotion out of the lyrics and melody. He keeps in time, too.

2. Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds

A masterclass in lyric writing, Mr Tambourine Man (1965) saw Dylan flexing his linguistic muscles to reel off dozens of intricate internal and end rhymes, including my personal favourite:

Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sandVanished from my handLeft me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping.

The Byrds’ version, released in the same year and hitting number one in both the US and the UK, isn’t better than the brilliant original (how could it be?) but it is brilliantly different.

The Byrds’ version of Mr Tambourine Man.

Abridging Dylan’s version in order to make for a more palatable running time for the singles market, what it lacks in lyrics it more than makes up for in melody. The harmonies in the chorus add to Dylan’s main vocal line. It was an era-defining moment that launched the folk-rock genre.

3. All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Dylan may have released the original version of All Along The Watchtower on his John Wesley Harding album in 1967, but it was The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s cover, released just six months later, which has largely been accepted as the definitive recording.

All Along the Watchtower performed by Jimi Hendrix.

Taking Dylan’s gentle acoustic guitar and harmonica number and feeding it through his legendary white Strat, Hendrix rocks seven shades of summer out of the song until it takes on a completely new life.

So great was his reinterpretation (it seems derisive to merely label it a “cover”) that as well as being ranked at number 40 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, Dylan amended the song’s structure for later live performances in order for it to be more like Hendrix’s.

4. If Not For You by George Harrison

Granted, I only heard Dylan’s recording of If Not For You after already being familiar with George Harrison’s version included on his 1970 album All Things Must Pass for several years, so it was always going to feel slightly foreign to me.

George Harrison performs If Not For You.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how unimpressive and strangely flat it seems compared to Harrison’s recording. Dylan’s run-together vocal lines were backed by oddly jaunty and accented side-stick drumming (with the snare struck on the second beat but then a quaver before the fourth instead of on the fourth itself) and punctuated with glockenspiel. It all adds up to a slightly confused and messy arrangement, which takes attention away from the sincerity of the lyrics.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

5. If Not For You by Olivia Newton John

When Olivia Newton-John issued her own cover of If Not For You in 1971, she wisely opted for the same arrangement as Harrison’s, thankfully, minus Phil Spector’s muddy over-production – and scored an international hit with it in the process.

If Not For You performed by Olivia Newton John.

To my mind If Not For You remains one of Dylan’s most simplistic, beautiful songs – so long as he’s not singing it.

6. Ballad of Hollis Brown by David Lynch

Appearing on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), Dylan presents the five-minute Ballad of Hollis Brown as its title suggests, as a traditional ballad in both form and theme. His voice is backed by a lone acoustic guitar, minus even his ever-present harmonica.

The Ballad of Hollis Brown by David Lynch.

Nearly half a century later, director David Lynch took time out from his day job to reimagine the song as drum-heavy claustrophobia, twisting the original until it would have been unrecognisable if not for its title and lyrics. Dylan diehards may want to give this one a miss, but for those of us who enjoyed the music from the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks series three, this is a winner. Läs mer…

Many of us assume that everything a musician sings emerges from some autobiographical impulse. Pop music lyrics in particular are often read literally by fans as transparent disclosures about the singer’s life.

For some reason, this seems to apply solely to lyrics. Writers from other media, such as film and TV, are generally presumed to create their characters and stories from their imaginations, rather than personal experience, even when writing in the first person.

As historian Michel Foucault says: “Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator’s account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies.”

Indeed, people don’t tend to leap to the conclusion that Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is a window into the soul of Bret Easton Ellis. Nor that Breaking Bad’s Walter White is merely a caricature of his creator Vince Gilligan.

So why do so many of us immediately assume every Taylor Swift lyric is a thinly veiled critique of an ex-boyfriend? Or that every new Kanye track is a window into his mental state?

In his book This is Your Brain On Music, psychologist Daniel Levitin notes that when we listen to music we are letting the songwriter into our living rooms and bedrooms when no-one else is around – even letting them into our ears, directly, through earbuds and headphones.

It is unusual, he says, to let oneself become so vulnerable with a total stranger. It’s understandable, then, that we want to our songwriters to be similarly vulnerable, and so believe their songs to be an exchange of confidence between us and them.

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In 2016, such autobiographical assumptions were applied to Sorry by Beyoncé. Part of her award-winning album Lemonade, the lines “He only want me when I’m not there / He better call Becky with the good hair” saw the internet erupt with theories. Fans attempted to uncover who the singer could have been referring to. Few people seemed to consider that Beyoncé may simply have created a fictional character in a fictional scenario.

The singer of Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke.
Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA

In 2013 the song Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke featuring T.I. and Pharrell was widely criticised for seeming to trivialise sexual violence, objectify women and reinforce rape myths. There wasn’t much room for debate about meanings in this song, but the fallout from the controversy suggests it’s the act of singing lyrics, rather than writing them, which makes people assume connection.

Hence it’s singer and co-writer, Robin Thicke – who also had a central role in the music video – has seen his career stall, while co-writer/producer Pharrell Williams has had multiple hit singles and recently celebrated the release of a Lego movie all about his life.

It’s true that the controversy around Thicke wasn’t helped by the fallout from his divorce and accusations of infidelity, as well as his live performance of the song with former Disney star Miley Cyrus at the 2013 Video Music Awards. But it does seem, as literary critics Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson put it, that listeners assume that “speech incarnates, so to speak, the speaker’s soul”, and that, as the “speaker” on Blurred Lines, Thicke is considered the one who supported its inadvisable and uncomfortable content.

Artist intervention

When an artist is inevitably asked “what’s the meaning behind this song?” and they give a literal answer, it immediately closes down the different ways a listener can interpret it.

Charli XCX, for example, when recently asked about the meaning of her song Apple, said: “I [wanted] to write a song about my kinda sticky relationship with my mom and dad.”

Once the writer’s intention, however vague, is revealed, the temptation is to elicit further meaning line by line. In the case of Apple, that has led to analyses such as: “‘I wanna grow the apple, keep all the seeds’ indicates a desire to nurture and preserve the positive aspects of [Charli’s Indian-Scottish] heritage.”

Charli XCX explained that her song Apple was inspired by her relationship with her parents.
Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo

Contemporary artists don’t even have to wait to be asked. In December, singer Sam Fender announced the release of new song People Watching via an Instagram post, saying it was “about somebody that was like a surrogate mother to me and passed away last November”.

To those who didn’t read the post, the opening lyrics “I people-watch on the way back home / Envious of the glimmer of hope / Gives me a break from feeling alone” could hold any number of different meanings. But Fender has limited the possibility for other interpretations.

Think for yourself

Masters of the lyrical craft use imagery, syntax, allegorical language, rhyme, perspective and numerous rhetorical devices to create emotive, persuasive or life-affirming work. Work which can, of course, be as fictitious as any other literary work.

When it comes to figuring out what a song is “about”, then, perhaps it’s better to look at what it means to us personally. Levitin says listeners form more of a bond with a song when we need to fill in some of the meaning for ourselves.

Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori by Weezer is composed of random lines.

Some songwriters invite such collaboration. John Lennon said he thought that whatever people make of his songs was valid. Neil Finn of Crowded House, meanwhile, claims he’s always happy when people get things “wrong” about his songs.

Some lyricists don’t even have a meaning in mind when they write. For the Weezer track Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori (2016), lead vocalist Rivers Cuomo drew lyrics from a spreadsheet containing a couple of thousand random lines. The resulting song suggests a coherent, real-life event but each line was actually from a completely different place and reassembled in an order that suggests a story that never happened.

In such cases, as the literary theorist Roland Barthes said in his essay The Death of the Author (1967), the author is only the person who writes the text. It is the reader – or, in our case, listener – who decides its meaning. Läs mer…