Rules 0-3 For Covering Bob Dylan Songs
Rule Zero is "DON'T COVER BOB DYLAN UNLESS YOU ARE COMFORTABLE WITH FAILURE"
Now that we’ve got that, we’ve also established that you are a wackadoodle for Dylan. I am, too. But I’m also not a great musician, and that gave me an advantage when I sat down about nine or ten times to recreate a Bob Dylan song broken down to the lyrics and built back up in weird concoctions I could never recreate live. This brings us to the first rule of covering Bob Dylan.
RULE 1: NOTHING YOU PLAY SHOULD SOUND LIKE BOB DYLAN
Throw out the key, the chord structure, the rhythm, and the tempo. Throw out the hooks. You are walking into the musical wilderness armed only with your lyric book. The good news is that when you build a song from the lyrics of a Nobel Prize-winning author of Literature, you’re already working with gold. Now, your job is to shape that gold into something artificially beautiful. After all, gold is only a pretty color until a human mashes it into pleasant shapes using technology tools. This brings us to:
RULE 2: CREATE AND DON’T RECREATE
Bob Dylan’s primary form of artistic expression is that of a writer of words that tell stories. However, Bob Dylan is a polymath, talented in multiple forms of artistic expression. His musical ability is unique and, at times, revelatory. He is known for mashing music and words together in new ways, effectively leading to playing nuanced music every night. Seek to put your human fingerprint into the music you are creating. Don’t think of it as a cover. Rather, consider what you are doing as a variation on a theme.
RULE 3: IF YOU ARE CRAZY ENOUGH TO COVER A BOB DYLAN SONG, MAKE IT AN EXPERIENCE THE WORLD HAS NEVER HEARD BEFORE
You’ve only got one shot at impressing a Dylan fan. You do not step up on stage, grab the microphone, and waste the audience’s time. This is a good rule for life, but especially when covering Bob Dylan songs.
So, with all that as a backdrop, I submit four of my favorite personal art projects where I was crazy enough to cover Bob Dylan’s music. Think of this project as a demented audio fanzine. I guarantee no one has ever covered Bob Dylan songs like the ones I present here. Also, no Generative AI was used to create this music. This music was recorded before this technology was released to the general public.
Love the creativity, JB! A big Dylan fan myself. But Dylan's main feature is his words. It's hard to hear them in your version. But maybe that was your point.