Bob Dylan has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Mostly because of my Dad, I grew up hearing his music around the house or in the car or from the back room where Dad was working. Eventually, at the beginning of my junior year of high school, I started really listening to Bob Dylan’s music. I remember one night spending a couple hours with Dad, watching Dylan’s live performances and interviews on our apple TV, and after that, I listened to Dylan’s music frequently.
In honor of his recent Nobel Prize, here are my 10 favorite Bob Dylan songs, listed with the albums in which they appear. Check these out if you are unfamiliar with his music or if you want to taste again the undertones of Dylan's poetry—it never wears out.
1. Make You Feel My Love, from Time Out of Mind
My Dad used to sing this to me before bed. This song has infiltrated my memory and heart to the extent that every time I hear of it or think of it, am ambushed by nostalgia. The lyrics are beloved to me and Bob makes it sweeter with his harmonica and his subtly inflected voice. The two opening chords of this song evoke images in my mind of dusky evenings, steaming sleepy-time tea offered me by my Dad when I was restless, sleeping-bag “camping” on the playroom floor with Sophia…
2. Like A Rolling Stone, from Highway 61 Revisited
This song describes college really well for me. In so many ways, I have found a home here at Valparaiso University, and I know that will only increase with time, but a part of my heart is back in Phoenix, even though my parents’ home will never again be home to me in the same way it was. Even more odd is the fact that at the end of the year, my dorm room which has become so cozy, so familiar, so almost homey to me, will be stripped and cleared and passed to the next freshman.
“How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
I am a vagabond, wandering through time, traveling my life, not yet settling down and not yet ready to. I make pause variously, stopping to see the sights, but always in the back of my mind is the persistent notion that sooner or later I will pack up, pick up, take another step, and move forward.
3. The Idiot Wind, from Blood on the Tracks
The melody, first of all, is so beautiful in this song. And the lyrics are fascinating, if heard with attention. Songs like this are the meat, the complexity, of Dylan’s poetry, which puzzle us and intrigue us and hold our emotions. This kind of literature is why Dylan won that Nobel Prize.
4. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later), from Blonde on Blonde
I don’t know what it is about harmonica that entices me so much. This song has a beautiful harmonica introduction that draws me in immediately. This song also has a Beatles vibe, thematically, and is incredibly poignant for a song in a major key. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this:
“sooner or later, one of us must know / that you just did what you were supposed to.”
Life happens, and sometimes it happens to us before we pick up on it, and we have to go with it. So sad, and so pretty.
5. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, from Blood on the Tracks
This is a story-song and it is glorious. I pick up on more details of the characters with each listen. It’s so ornate yet in the classic Dylan fashion, the melody is deceptively simple. He hides complexity under a folksy, approachable facade.
6. Visions of Johanna, from Blonde on Blonde
My dad discovered this song a couple years ago and became fixated on it. He played it to me and my mom and Sophia, and quoted it incessantly. “The ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face,” he would say to me in the grocery checkout lane or on a winter walk around the neighborhood or across the table at a restaurant when we went out together. He spoke those haunting words with such urgency, as though he would not survive in quite his fullest form unless I understood the gravity of this image in this song.
I’m sure I disappointed him with my lacking response to his song but in actuality, it is hauntingly beautiful and so typical of Bob’s rambling style. I too have felt that urgency, that inability to communicate the importance of a song or piece of art, and the overwhelming desire to share what I love with the people I love. This song was one of those moments for my Dad and I love that he and I have both felt that need to give art to another, in the deepest sense of the word give.
7. Tangled Up In Blue, Blood on the Tracks
Again, the poetry! The poetry. Dylan is first and always a poet, and his words are made nascent by his music. Listen to the words of this song and savor them, inhaling each word and holding it within yourself, feeling its weight there, then slowly releasing it to make room for the next.
8. Shelter from the Storm, from Blood on the Tracks
I love Bob’s voice in this song. And as always, the imagery and emotion within the lyrics are endlessly compelling.
9. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Highway 61 Revisited
A classic. Oldie but goodie. I hear this song and I feel a brief, tender connection with an era of American history which is gone. I feel a connection with people who were passionate and free and tender.
10. Standing in the Doorway, Time Out of Mind
This song is riddled with heart-breaking moments and glimpses of joy. The back-and-forth between these extremes of emotion exemplify to me the constant flow of emotion in our lives, which is something beyond our control but se essential to our beings.
