Creative Style

Bob Dylan's Blues was composed spontaneously. It's one of what he calls his "really off-the-cuff songs. I start with an idea, and then I feel what follows. Best way I can describe this one is that it's sort of like walking by a side street. You gaze in and walk on." 

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records. 

"Hard Rain [written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962] is a desperate kind of song. Every line in it, is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one." 

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records.

[of the song Don't Think Twice, It's All Right] A lot of people make it sort of a love song - slow and easy-going. But it isn't a love song. It's a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It's as if you were talking to yourself. It's a hard song to sing. I can sing it sometimes, but I ain't that good yet. I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themsleves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people. I sometimes am able to do it, but it happens, when it happens, unconsciously. You see, in time, with those older singers, music was a tool - a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better some times, but at other times, it's still hard to go to sleep at night.

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records.

[of the song Oxford Town] "It's a banjo tune I play on the guitar." 

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records.

I'm not one of those guys who goes around changing songs just for the sake of changing them. But I'd never heard Corrina, Corrina exactly the way it first was, so that this version is the way it came out of me. 

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem. Anything I can't sing or anything that's too long to be a poem, I call a novel. But my novels don't have the usual story-lines. They're about my feelings at a certain place at a certain time. 

- from the sleeve notes to the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Colombia Records.

my songs're written with the kettledrum in mind / a touch of any anxious color. unmentionable. obvious. an people perhaps like a soft brazilian singer ... i have given up at making any attempt at perfection

- from the sleeve notes to the album Bringing It All Back Home, released March 1965 by Colombia Records.

i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me

- from the sleeve notes to the album Bringing It All Back Home, released March 1965 by Colombia Records.

the Great books've been written. the Great sayings have all been said

- from the sleeve notes to the album Bringing It All Back Home, released March 1965 by Colombia Records.

my poems are written in a rhythm if unpoetic distortion / divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes / subtracted by people constantly torturing each other. with a melodic purring line of descriptive hallowness - seen at times thru dark sunglasses an other forms of psychic explosion. a song is anything that can walk by itself / i am called a songwriter. a poem is a naked person ... some people say that i am a poet

- from the sleeve notes to the album Bringing It All Back Home, released March 1965 by Colombia Records.