What has the ability to transcend between two people whom have never met? Thoughts do I suppose. I think of you so often I can only imagine on some level how that energy must swirl through the atmosphere.
Everyone who knows me also knows how huge my adoration for you is. Many can’t understand it and so I’m often asked, why do you like Bob Dylan so much? People are diverse and so I tend to generalize my reasons depending on who I’m talking to.
To one I might say how your music is such a harsh necessity in my life, without it I might be a more ignorant person, a little blind and twice as dumb. To another I might explain that you are the voice of passion and articulation, so essential to this world and even worlds away from home, how your songs can age yet still remain crucially young, affecting minds today. To somebody else, perhaps feeling that nothing I could say would make much sense, I might just say because I think he’s sexy, or he stimulates my brain.
I like you so much because of all those reasons and many others.
I like how you can gather ideas and lure us to listen. I like how remote you are while delivering your songs with such yearning. It thrills me when I’m attending one of your shows and something makes you laugh. Your happiness makes me happy. I admire most deeply how you carry each song to its conclusion, whether you’re talking about love or betrayal or crime.
Somewhere in one of these letters I must have told you how your music rounds with intelligence, how your words which are so dear to me distinguish you from all the rest, how your voice lingers in my head for days after hearing a particular live version of a song I discovered on some remote web site. Surely I’ve said all of this to you before now.
Once I was sitting in the third row at one of your shows. You were just concluding Absolutely Sweet Marie when a young guy behind me tapped my shoulder and said, that is my favorite song of his, I love how assured he sounds when he sings it.
This guy couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. I smiled at him and nodded, then turned back so not to miss another second and caught you just as you buckled in above the keyboard to sing Masters of War. My heart fell.
It feels like only yesterday.
8 responses so far ↓
david // June 18, 2007 at 9:18 am |
lisa – liked very much what you wrote about dylan – especially the notion that he’s remote while singing with such yearning…. i know exactly what you mean, but hadn’t seen it that way. thanks. can i add something else? dylan, like all great artists, articulates experiences in a way that clarifies them for the rest of us – those of us who are less articulate. how many times have you read a book, or seen a painting or heard a piece of music, and thought – ‘ yes, i recognise that. i can see it in my own life – but maybe clearer now’? that’s what dylan has done for me since i was a kid – and yes, i love him for it (without, i hope, being weird about it, which i think sone dylan fans are…. )
(also – in a medium which is famous for being – well, not very literate, – dylan loves words. loves the sounds of them. loves sentences. that, combined with his insight, is a rare combination.)
be well – david.
Chris // June 18, 2007 at 12:05 pm |
Beautifully conceived and written.
‘I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me’ – Mississippi
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Angela // June 18, 2007 at 12:26 pm |
Hi Lisa.
I wrote to you one long time ago when someone put your link on Expecting Rain and your courteously replied.
It is inspiring that you continue to record your thoughts about this wonderful thing in this world. And you’ve nailed it again.
I was to Amsterdam and the UK shows in April, and think I’m heading to Bethel and Essex Junction at the end of this month. As someone jokingly said to me recently, “Ain’t no cure.
All the best, Angela
Top Posts « WordPress.com // June 18, 2007 at 11:58 pm |
[...] Dear Bob Dylan, What has the ability to transcend between two people whom have never met? Thoughts do I suppose. I think of you so […] [...]
John Pilecki // June 19, 2007 at 1:18 am |
Lisa – As a guy in his later fifites who, back in the middle 1970’s, made a pilgrimage to Hibbing to try to understand the “harsh necessity” of Dylan’s influence on my own psyche, I thank you for sharing your own expression of an obsession that transcends explanation, time, and place. jp
Nathan // June 19, 2007 at 11:16 pm |
Hey gal. Nice job on the digs. Anyway, Dylan don’t care about none of us. He’s trippin on his day to day man. He gets off on the fact that he could care less about it all. When you finally GET that, Dylan truly becomes what he has set out to be since forever, a performer and writer of stories, songs or whatever the hell we all want to call them. But it’s all pretty hilarious to him. Didn’t you READ the part in chronicles when he “found” his voice again while stumbling into that dive in S.F. while rehearsing on Front Street with the Dead? THAT is Dylan. Not the words he writes or the way he delivers or how long he can hold his breath or any of that. It’s THAT type of occurence that makes Dylan, well, Dylan. Reread, rewrite, rewire and rethink it all. He’s a damn Road Warrior and that’s it.
Ike van Eijk // August 23, 2007 at 12:13 pm |
Good day to you mister Dylan, this week is 34, some ago I was looking at architecture of Steiner Rudolf born 1861. He has a website http://www.Rudolf Steiner.com. Do you like a book of his buildings, I can suggest to your personality try make drawings in colour. The food I suggest is pastry with fresh steamed (basket-key from IKEA) eggplant buy seeds you may as well publish my letter, Thanks.
John // June 3, 2008 at 5:01 am |
Bob Dylan is a joke. I just love someone who complains so much about a capitalist system and how much injustice it brings to the world but then captitalizes off of it. The more a capitalist system is capitalized upon…the more “Injustice its brings” Bob Dylan said this, but the money he has made off of it is 10 fold compaired to the average American….Oh wait here is stat, when it comes to actually giving his vast amount of money to charities and such, the average middle American has given more than him. He is a hypocrite…if he actually cared he would live his message…dude is a fink.