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“after all, he seems to have a lot to say about what can’t be said.” Bertrand Russell. Ludwig Wittgenstein came from a very wealthy and talented family of Vienna, in the time before WW I, a family of musicians, professors, and suicides. He went to grammar school with Adolf Hitler. His sister helped Sigmund Freud […]
Our solar system is not a perfect clock. There have been 16 ice ages in the past million years. “Small variations in the tilt of the Earth on its axis and variations in the planet’s elliptical path around the sun are all that is necessary to plunge the planet in and out of the freezer. […]
Alberto Giacometti lived most of his sculptor life in a Paris apartment/studio, without hot water or a bathroom. Brother Diego was his foundry assistant. He chain-smoked 4 packs a day, and wore the same grey, herring bone suit, 24 hours a day. He would buy a new one – same color, same style – once a year. He went to restaurants for his meals, bistros and clubs for drinks […]
Laureate
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Think AgainThere is singing, and then there is singing. Bob Dylan does singing. Listen to ‘House of the rising Sun’, on his very first album.
Malcolm Gladwell speaks of innovators, people who are always different. They wear odd clothes in ways that others don’t and wouldn’t. They start fads, but they don’t follow them. They never follow the herd. Whatever it is that makes most people want to be like others, and join in with others, they don’t have. It is a life strategy. Think about it. Always being different avoids comparison. You can win when only you are playing.
“What others think about me, or feel about me, that’s so irrelevant. Anymore than it is for me, when I go see a movie, say Wuthering Heights or something, and have to wonder what Lawrence Olivier is really like.”
This is Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan. He still insists on being him, whether you like it or not. He has a born focus on his own, inner experience. With his trained skills of melody and lyric, he expresses what he finds there. He wants no contrivance, no preconceived, or planned song. He doesn’t want us to understand him. He doesn’t think we should try to understand him. He just wants us to listen to the songs. “It’s all in the songs.” Be open to what a song does for you, not what you are told to think it means, or what you think it is supposed to mean. Rather than think the song. . .feel it.
“If a song moves, you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”
Hey Mr. Tambourine man/ Play a song for me/Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship/My senses have been stripped/My hands can’t feel to grip/My toes too numb to step/wait only for my boot heels to be wandering/I’m ready to go anywhere/ I’m ready for to fade/Into my own parade/Cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it.
“I can write a song in a crowded room. Inspiration can hit you anywhere. It’s magic. It really is beyond me.”
“My songs are personal music, they’re not communal. I wouldn’t want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I’m not playing campfire meetings.”
My hearts in the highlands with the horses and hounds/Way up in the border country far from the towns/With the twang of the arrow and the snap of the bow/My heart’s in The highlands, can’t see any other way to go
“John Donne, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, ‘the Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests’. I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.” Nobel Lecture, 2017.
“I’m no poet. Poets drown in lakes.”