(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Records)
Bob Dylan has done a lot. By now, he has 40 studio albums under his belt, 17 volumes of the expansive Bootleg Series, 21 live albums and over 44 compilation collections. All in all, he’s released over 100 singles and, along the way, solidified his status as one of the most respected musicians to have ever lived. But still, there’s something to tick off.
Agree or not, Dylan has spent his career evolving. As he “burst onto the scene already a legend”, as Baez sang of, he emerged in the early 1960s as the new wonder kid of folk. He was almost instantly hailed as the future of the genre and, perhaps, even its saviour, igniting new interest in the sounds. He was also finding new ways to use music for good as he initially used his lyricism to tackle social injustice like his peers and heroes.
And then the first change came. When Dylan abandoned politics, going on to say, “I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world,” people were let down. That letdown then turned to outright outrage when he first picked up an electric guitar and seemed to be fully turning his back on folk as a whole.
He did, and he didn’t. For a while longer, there was always an element of folk in Dylan’s music, but he also went far beyond that. Throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the production grew bigger and more genre-less as his growing influences were reflected in his records, along with an increasing willingness to collaborate with people and change his artistic makeup.
Then, a change happened again, and again, and again. Suddenly, his voice seemed to completely switch up. The 1980s saw him start making Christian worship music, then odd pop-rock, then join a supergroup, and so on. As he sped through the records and the decades, he ticked off a long list of things other artists would spend a career just thinking about doing. But that doesn’t mean he became goalless because there was another thing left to try.
“Well, my next musical dream is to make a record of classical music,” Dylan admitted to the Italian newspaper la Repubblica in 1993. At the time, he was in the process of somewhat achieving that as he said, “I’m already working with a symphony orchestra.” A year later, he performed alongside a 64-piece Japanese orchestra in Nara for an incredible performance. Performed over three nights and filmed on the last, it was for The Great Music Experience, a TV broadcast that paired Western and Japanese musicians and filmed them performing live in the stunning location of an ancient temple.
However, as far as classical music goes, that’s one dream as yet unachieved; as Dylan said back then, “maybe one day”, but he still hasn’t gotten around to it. Who knows, maybe that one day will come soon. Dylan’s live shows seem to have become increasingly abstract as his voice weakens, and his desire to sing his own hits continues to dwindle further and further. Perhaps this will be his final solution to get out of having to sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ by simply letting a string section do it instead.
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