What makes Bob Dylan’s music move us? In this thoughtful essay, author Kevin Kane reflects on Dylan’s mystique, the nature of artistic resonance, and why the songs matter more than any attempt to explain them.
This piece is an early glimpse into Kane’s upcoming book, Seeking Mirth and Beauty, arriving later this year. The book doesn’t try to solve Dylan’s puzzle — it simply sits with it, letting the music speak.
Enjoy the essay below, shared in full.
Seeking Mirth and Beauty
Musings on a Song and Dance Man
“While we seek mirth and beauty…” is a line from an American parlor song by Stephen Foster that Bob Dylan covered on his 1992 record, Good As I Been To You. Dylan’s work has been good to us, and the world is a better place for that work having been brought to fruition. There have been many books written about Bob Dylan that are based on his life, on gossip about his life, or on guess work. Those books have little to do with the work that Dylan has brought to the world. There are writers and critics who have tried to explicate Dylan’s songs and lyrics, trying to figure out for themselves, and to explain to interested listeners, just what it was that Bob Dylan really meant. That is a way to approach Dylan’s work—but it’s not the way that he seems to approach his work and it’s never particularly insightful.
There are no convoluted or secret meanings to the songs that Bob Dylan writes and sings. The songs are just what they are—although admittedly, there is no simple category for just what that might be. That is certainly true. It is also true that Dylan’s life story reveals little or nothing about the work he has produced. And so, the focus here will not be on Bob Dylan the man or on what any particular song might mean, but rather how and why some songs work. Dylan’s work is of particular interest because there is something in it that resonates with our own experience of the world—or that resonates with something deep inside of us. And that’s enough.
Dylan is an anomaly—and his work is outsider art. He is as much an abstract-impressionist artist as he is a traditional songwriter—though what he produces are songs. His work is as demanding, complex and enigmatic as he seems to be—though we are fooling ourselves to think that we know much about him. Knowing how very private Dylan has been over the years, for a public figure—and so unwilling to offer easy explanations of his life’s work, it was surprising to read a posting he made one time on his official Bob Dylan website.
“Everybody knows by now,” Dylan wrote, “that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”
It’s impossible to know whether that posting was facetious or not, but he did make the suggestion. I started this project for my own edification some time before that was written—but I’ll still take that encouragement as Bob Dylan’s personal okay. What I want to know, to figure out, is what exactly it is that makes Dylan’s work so moving for so many people—and so very unlike any other singer/songwriter you’ve ever come across. What did you hear? What exactly are the qualities that make Dylan songs what they are? And why do those qualities—whatever they are—work so well? Why are there so few songwriters working the way Dylan does? And why has this songwriter, performer and cultural icon, winner of every award possible, and on every critic’s short list of honorees to be included if there was ever a rock stars’ Mount Rushmore—never had a number one hit song on the radio? Not a single one. It’s a good question.
In my forthcoming book, Seeking Mirth and Beauty, and with more postings to follow here, I will muse a bit on that question—not to provide for you any easy answers, but more to give you something to think about when you consider Bob Dylan and the work he’s brought to us.
(For those readers who know Dylan’s work well, you’ll find a number of places in these posts and in my book where I am using lifted lines from Dylan’s lyrics. There are two lines on just this page!)
And so more to follow,
Kevin Kane