Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylanis an American singer-songwriter, artist and writer. He has been influential in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when his songs chronicled social unrest, although Dylan repudiated suggestions from journalists that he was a spokesman for his generation. Nevertheless, early songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the American civil rights and anti-war movements. After he left...
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth24 May 1941
CityDuluth, MN
It's always disappointing when people decide for one reason or another that they don't like your work anymore, but you can't try to please people, because then you're just going to be doing - you'll never live it down, y'know it'll always be dogging you around - you might be being a fake about the whole thing.
The more you act the further you get away from the truth.
Sometimes you get out from behind the wheel and let someone else step on the gas.
People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through.
I used to think it's better if you just live and die and no one knows who you are.
Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It's just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you're doing that other people don't know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn't work. There's no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. It's a bit like alchemy.
I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.
It's not important what other people call you. If you yourself know you're a fake, that's tougher to live with.
What politics I ever learned, I learned in the streets, because it was part of the environment.
The dirt of gossip blows into my face and the dust rumors cover me. But if the arrow is straight and the point is slick, it can pierce through dust no matter how thick.
Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed.
Everyone of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.
The good Samaritan, he's getting dressed, he's getting ready for the show. He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.
Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.