We’ve tackled love, and stories, and politics – three primary prongs of Bob Dylan’s songwriting. But Dylan has a lot more outstanding creations that don’t neatly fit into those categories. I’m calling them “personal” songs, but really, that is just a catchall for everything else. “Five great ‘everything else’ songs” doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, so “personal” it is.
I didn’t set out to choose songs representative of eras in Dylan’s long career. But it worked out that way a little bit due to the way he has changed as a songwriter. For instance, he has written political songs throughout his entire career, but he did it more early on. Consequently, the political songs list leaned on those early albums.
The reverse is true with today’s list. Dylan has written personal songs – songs about his feelings about life and death and the nature of man (divorced from love and politics) for sixty-plus years. But I believe he has written more songs – and perhaps better songs – in this vein later in life. So today’s list tilts toward later Dylan to a greater degree than any of the earlier lists.
Five fantastically excellent songs from Bob Dylan
If you basically tuned him out after Desire in 1976, maybe this list isn’t for you. Or maybe you’ll find a couple of songs worth your attention that you didn’t know about. Only one way to find out. Read on.
“HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED” (1965)
“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son, -- Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
Was there ever a better opening couplet? Complete with a siren whistle to create the carnival atmosphere, Dylan takes us through a veritable Felliniesque assortment of oddballs and ne’er-do-wells like Georgia Sam and Mack the Finger. There are kings and there are wars and a thousand telephones that won’t ring.
Does it mean anything? Your guess is as good as mine. I see it as a fantastically elaborate way of saying people come in all shapes and sizes and have all kinds of bizarre problems. And for each one of us, there is a mythical Highway 61 lurking just past what we understand as reality, where all those strangers gather together for a party.
There’s no harmonica here – the whistle took care of that. Just galloping drums, pounding pianos, and stabbing guitars driving it all ahead at a breakneck pace. PJ Harvey – when she was still fronting her band – recorded an explosive version in 1993. It is mostly drums and odd modulation – a fairly perfect way to treat the song.
“KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR” (1973)
From Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dylan had a role in the film. He’s OK – nothing special. But this elegiac consideration of death was his real contribution. The usually loquacious Dylan is remarkably restrained here.
At two-and-a-half minutes, it is one of his shortest songs. The entire song is comprised of two simple requests made by a dying lawman to his wife – take my badge, and take my guns. That’s it, along with a beautiful, heavenly chorus accompanying him on the wonderfully evocative title phrase.
The song has lent itself to much longer guitar workouts from legends like Eric Clapton and Slash, who teamed with Axl Rose’s tortured vocals to produce the most famous version. The Grateful Dead closed their shows with “Knockin’…” quite a few times back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A decade later, it would help give some gravitas to 19-year-old Avril Lavigne’s My World album.
“SILVIO” (1988)
From Down in the Groove, at a time when people were beginning to doubt whether Dylan would ever get back to where he had once been. His albums from earlier in the ‘80s were decent, but not special. You might say the same thing about “Silvio.” I mean, I would be hard-pressed to call it a ground-breaking song. But it is great fun, with great pace, a catchy chorus, and enough lyrical wit to claim a respectable place in the Dylan panoply.
If none of that makes the case that should be counted as one of his best, let me offer this defense. After some of the playful songs Dylan recorded very early on, this might be the most fun Dylan is having in at least two decades.
I think of this song in the same way I think of one of my honorable mentions on this list – “Forever Young.” You see, fifteen years earlier, people were asking the same questions of Dylan. Had he lost it? Would he ever be the same guy he was before his motorcycle accident in the mid-1960s?
When he released Planet Waves in 1974, he signaled a return to form. Not his best album maybe, but there were flashes. “Forever Young,” a gorgeous song about youth and age, was the brightest flash. A year later, he would release Blood on the Tracks. “Silvio” is the flash that preceded Oh Mercy the following year. Maybe he did really do what he said he would in “Silvio” – “find out something only dead men know.”
“NOT DARK YET” (1997)
“Not Dark Yet” may be the best song Dylan wrote between the mid-1970s and his epic return in 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. The poignance drips from every line without ever becoming maudlin. A lot of the credit goes to producer Daniel Lanois, who had worked with Dylan a decade earlier on Oh Mercy and returned here to give a strong batch of original songs a lush quality that previously had not fit so well with Dylan’s output. Not that he hadn’t tried for that kind of sound. It just never seemed right.
Dylan had done a more standard version of the song before Lanois got his hands on it. Lanois got him to slow it down and added an ephemeral organ and two different drums to make it sound almost like a march. “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear – It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” So sad, and yet so strangely comforting at the same time.
“FALSE PROPHET” (2020)
Rough and Rowdy Ways is filled with righteous anger. This is an old man who has seen it all and is disgusted by most of it. “False Prophet” is the second track, and its early lyric “I know how it happened – I saw it all begin – I opened my heart to the world and the world came in” helps set up the epic final track “Murder Most Foul.” As with so many of Dylan’s most ambitious songs, the lyrics teem with references to everything from antiquity to modern pop culture.
But the music – the music is pure blues. Guitarist Charlie Sexton, who has been playing with Dylan for the past 25 years, carries the song, right through the final 30-second outro. And Dylan’s voice, full of wisdom and gravel, becomes a blues instrument itself. And when he tells you “I ain’t no false prophet – I just said what I said – I’m just here to bring vengeance down on somebody’s head,” you should probably believe him. Sixty-plus years of writing these songs, and he can still bring it.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“All Along the Watchtower” (1967)
"Forever Young" (1974)
"This Wheel's on Fire" (1967/1975)
"Most of the Time" (1989)
"Duquesne Whistle" (2012)