Thinking By Hand
How Bob Dylan Got His Mojo Back
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Against Introspection
On the evening of May 7th - next Thursday - I will be talking BEATLES with Professor Helen Thompson at the Unherd Club in Westminster. You may know Helen for her magisterial analyses of economics, politics, and history. You may not know that she is also a huge Beatles fan. I’m very excited about this, it’s going to be a fascinating chat. Some tickets are still available. Come and join us!
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. It seems to have hit him pretty hard.
Winning the Nobel was an immense honour, an affirmation of Dylan’s unique place in cultural history, as a popular songwriter who deserves to be considered alongside Yeats, Faulkner, and Hemingway. It was also hotly controversial; the first time a musician had been awarded the prize.
Dylan himself seemed uncertain about how to react. It took him two weeks to even acknowledge the award. He first let it be known that he was keen to attend the ceremony, and then decided not to. He did submit the lecture that every Nobel laureate is expected to deliver, but he did so at the last minute, and in recorded form.
All in all, he appears to have been deeply ambivalent. According to the Dylan expert Laura Tenschert, this extraordinarily productive artist was enduring a creative slump that year, comparable to the one he went through in the early 1970s - a time, he later said, when he lost touch with his songwriting inspiration. In 2016, it had been four years since his last album of original songs, which had not been well received. Although he kept touring, he wouldn’t create another album for four more years.
Tenschert speculates that the Nobel made Dylan wonder if his songwriting days were permanently over. If the prize was perceived as the ultimate capstone on his long career, it might also have seemed like the seal on a tomb. No wonder he didn’t want to attend his own funeral.1
Dylan did find his mojo again, eventually. Rough and Rowdy Ways, which came out during the pandemic in 2020, was a triumph, now widely considered one of his very best albums. Tenschert traces the beginning of Dylan’s creative resurgence to 2018, and to his rediscovery of a song he wrote decades before, around the time of that prior period of creative anxiety.
When I Paint My Masterpiece, a song about restless artistic ambition, was written in 1971. Dylan never released it (it became known through a cover by The Band, and as a bootleg). He never played it in concert either, despite his consistently busy touring schedule. But in 2018, after having ignored the song for years, Dylan started playing it live again and made it a fixture of his setlist. He played it at every single one of his 77 concerts in 2019, and has done so at virtually every one since.
In 2018, then, this song seems to have suddenly acquired a new significance for him, in a way that reinvigorated his muse. Tenschert explains that he wasn’t just playing it in these concerts, but reworking it, changing the lyrics in subtle ways to reflect his life as an artist in old age, prefiguring the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways. I suggest you check out her fascinating podcast to find out more about this story. For our purposes, I want to draw your attention to what she thinks triggered Dylan’s renaissance: the act of writing out its lyrics.
In 2018, two years after the Nobel, the Halcyon Gallery in London staged an exhibition of Dylan’s work. It consisted of lyric sheets to his songs, handwritten for the show by Dylan, with accompanying pencil drawings by him.2 When I Paint My Masterpiece was featured in the show, in two different versions. The words Dylan wrote down for these lyric sheets were closer to the version he then took to the stage. Tenschert’s theory, supported by the curator of the Halcyon show, is that the act of writing down the lyrics to his songs, including Masterpiece, ignited something in Dylan. He began to think about those old songs, and about his artistic journey, in a new light. From then on, he was on the road that led to Rough and Rowdy Ways.
The physical process of writing seems to have unblocked Dylan’s subconscious creativity, waking him up to new possibilities. There does seem to be something special about scratching out words on to a page with a pen or pencil. A few small but suggestive studies have found cognitive benefits to handwriting. Numerous novelists and poets have said they prefer it to typing, when working. There is something about the interplay between hand and mind which generates ideas and insights.
After the jump: what this tells about how cognition and perception really work, and what might have been going on inside Dylan’s head (with an assist from Ted Hughes). Plus an inspirational Rattle Bag: why Zohran Mamdani is so good in interviews; why it’s so hard to store clothes in a satisfactory manner; how oil is produced; the Beatles track Jack Antonoff thinks is the greatest recording ever made, and much more…
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