'It's Alright, Ma' would be the prototype for that tune, I freely admit, ... When I was 12 years old, or however old I was when Bringing It All Back Home came out, I'd just skip back and forth endlessly between 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'It's Alright, Ma' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' and now my Dylan roots are showing big time. |
[And how did he recover the patience that allowed him to await the arrival of songs for his 21st century trio of brilliant, contemplative, philosophical and socially conscious albums?] I just walked away from [the commercial career] and let it dismantle itself, ... I bit the bullet and crossed over that threshold to the realization that I may not be a big star in this thing. Maybe my path is something else. So I just started driving my kids to school and looking out after them. I stumbled onto a fantastic woman and built a relationship and became more solid inside myself and went back to work with a different mind-set, which is to please myself, because it's the only way I can be original. |
and I innocently hit an electric commercial streak, writing some songs and making some music that was just an exploration of a particular moment in my creative path but struck a chord in the country part of the culture at the time. Unfortunately for me, it sent me into a bit of self-consciousness where I sort of abandoned the patience and started thinking, 'Oh, I've made money for these people, now I've got to make more money for them.' The funny thing about me is I was twisted enough that I didn't think about the money I was making for myself. I come from a lack of privilege, post-Depression era people, and we would never presume that we possessed the worthiness to strike it rich on our own. So it sent me into trying to write hits, and it's not my favorite time of my -- would you call it a legacy? -- my career. That's the point where I got self-conscious, and self-consciousness is the enemy of good art. You've got to come from the innocent, subconsciously clear place. |
Democracy won't work if we're asleep...It's a wicked world and we're all in it/But that could change in a New York minute...So pray for peace until you're hoarse/And maybe fear will run its course. |
Don?t Get Me Started |
Epictetus was a peasant child born about 50 A.D. who grew up to be a well-known Stoic philosopher, ... In modern buzz-word speak, he was the inventor of 'What people think of me is none of my business.' So I got really hooked on him. |
Guy came to my house, walked in the door, and the first thing he said to me was, 'Shut up,' ... And when Guy takes that kind of stance, you listen. He said, 'We've got something to do.' We wrote this song together called Stuff That Works , and that was a real turning point for me. That's when Guy kind of reintroduced me to myself. |
He's the guy that developed the philosophy of, 'What people think of me is none of my business,' ... It evoked Picasso and Miles Davis for me — two great artists who totally indulged themselves in their work and who they were, but they certainly didn't give a damn what other people thought. |
I am deeply saddened by the loss of my children's grandfather and my very dear friend. I loved big John with all my heart. ... Johnny Cash will, like Will Rogers, stand forever as a symbol of intelligence, creativity, compassion and common sense. |
I don't think it will ever be my style to take a big mallet and just ... bust the window with it, ... I have to get there in a more subtle way. |
I wanted to dismantle any show-business pretense and take this thing straight as a human being, ... So I said, 'I'm gonna write this, and where I think I'm great, I'm gonna say it, and where I think I'm not, I'm gonna say it. And I'm gonna try to love and accept myself along the way.' |
I’ve always been happy with my songwriting, but for a long time I didn’t want to hear myself. I didn’t like what I heard. Now I think I’ve found my own voice, which is a cliché among us writer people, but I’ve learned that it’s a cliché for a good reason. |
So I set it in a bar and made him say, 'Hey, I'm a drag when I've had a few drinks, you know?' While I was careful to give him ownership of the fact that he was ranting, it's certainly my beliefs. To me, the presidential election was a smokescreen, a diversion. From my point of view, the engine room for what's wrong is in Congress. That's really the connection between the people and government. |
So recently I went back and walked it, and it was only 24 blocks. Walking up Wayside Drive from Avenue P up to past Navigation?You know it's still a Pentecostal church, only it's a Spanish one now. |
To me, the outsider is God, ... If you take extreme fundamentalist Muslims, who believe it's sent down from Allah that destroying the infidel is their duty, and then if you take the extreme fundamentalists on the Christian right, God got disenfranchised somewhere in that deal a long, long time ago. The minute you start saying 'I'm the only one that's right,' you have lost it, as far as I'm concerned. |