I woke up this morning just in time to catch the very end of M. Night Shyamalan's Lady In The Water on HBO, still thinking about this article.  After a few seconds, I realized that song softly playing under the closing credits was the haunting cover of Dylan's classic folk anthem "The Times They Are A Changingin"  by a group called A Whisper in the Noise.  (At left, Dylan circa 1962)

Shyamalan uses four  Dylan covers in his modern fairy tale, including "Every Grain of Sand", "It Aint Me, Babe", and "Maggie's Farm", skillfully blending Dylan's classic poetic architecture into his own instant classic by replacing the songwriter's unmistakably raspy voice with other, less attention-demanding voicings.

When the credits for Lady in the Water came to an end, they were replaced by a promo for the new season of the  HBO vampire series, "True Blood",  complete with a Bob Dylan sound track instead of a voice over.

Bob Dylan is ubiquitous. There's no other word for it.  The unwashed phenomenon who burst onto the folk music scene in 1961, has demonstrated a durability that has eclipsed virtually every other popular artist.  But no good thing lasts forever, and Dylan, at long last, is showing his age, but he's doing it as gracefully as he does everything he does.

Dylan is so ubiquitous that we don't even notice how often we hear Dylan in the background in films and television programs.  One memorable episode of Cold Case, justly praised for its use of background music, had an all-Dylan  soundtrack.  A recent episode of the popular NBC series Numbers included references to a rare Dylan album that has four songs that were never officially released.  Only twenty copies of the variant album were ever pressed.   If you own one, you're a millionnaire. 

While working on this article, sitting in my easy chair in front of the television (my usual position while writing) I happened to notice yet another Dylan cut playing in the  background in a scene shot in a bowling alley for an old NCIS episode. 

Not to coin a phrase, Dylan - the one-time troubadour of the counter-culture - has become ubiquitous.

By someone's actual count, Dylan tracks have been used in at least 96 different films and more than  30 television series (someone missed the episode of Numbers), but that doesn't include a truly innumerable number of films and television programs in which snippets of Dylan songs appear in ambient background sound.  Like I said, he's ubiquitous....to the point where I am beginning to wonder if anyone, including Dylan himself, knows how many of his tracks have been used in films, television, and on the internet.  Come to think of it, I'll bet no one really knows how often Dylan has been quoted in print.

He's also the only popular musician to score an entire film that wasn't about him (Sam Peckinpah's 1979 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), and the only popular artist to ever get an unjustly convicted man (Hurricane Rubin Carter) released from unjust imprisonment with a song,  later used as the theme for Hurricane, the film  about Carter's struggle for freedom.

He also, quite literally, saved my life once, in a surrealistic conversation during which he quietly convinced me, at the tender age of 17,  not to join the Marines and go off to fight in Vietnam, a journey from which I would not have returned.  (Someone might have come back -I'm not a fatalist - but the man who might have come back from Vietnam would not be the person I am now.)

Dylan probably doesn't remember the conversation.  That's part of the cost of fame;  there are many more people who know you than there are people you know when your famous.  Sometimes I wonder if it ever really happened (repeat a true story often enough and it loses it's reality and begin to seem made up)  but that doesn't change the fact that Dylan has probably changed more lives for the better than any other performing artist ever.


His latest album, Together Through Life, continues the pre-occupation with aging that first surfaced in 1997's Time Out of Mind, and continued through Love and Theft, in 2001, and Modern Times, in 2006, but there's a critical difference between this album and its recent predecessors.  Many critics saw Time Out of Mind as the beginning of a new direction for Dylan, and as the beginning of a trilogy that included Love and Theft and Modern Times.  In a Rolling Stone interview, Dylan himself has said that, if there is a trilogy at all, it begins with Love and Theft and continues through this most recent offering.  (Dylan's album covers are always important to the overall production, but the Together Through Life cover art is clearly the most mysterious of them all.)

Time Out of Mind was a watershed album, introducing a new, more introspective, and perhaps even more self-involved Dylan.  It was a difficult album to listen to because of its content, being the reflections of an unhappy man nearing what he believes is the end of his life.  The keynote line from the album was, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," from the song, "Not Dark Yet."   As a song, it's a powerful lyric.  As a poem, it's devastating by itself, without the music.   When I first heard Time Out of Mind, I hated it, perhaps because I don't my icons to grow old and infirm, but more likely because, with his inerrant accuracy, Dylan had once again captured the moment I was living in, as though he were looking over my shoulder the whole time.

Poets, and song writers, are both products and producers of the consciousness of their generations.  As Joyce wrote, poetry is the weapon through which the poet would "create the uncreated conscience of my race."  Substitute "generation" for "race" and quote encapsulates Dylan as well as Joyce. 

Love and Theft  really grabs you right up front  with what appears to be a somewhat more light-hearted, Tweeddle-Dee and Tweedle-dum-ish kind of album, as though Dylan had somehow recovered a lost equilibrium, remembering that you get more flies with irony than you do with melancholy.  The songs depend more on allegory than metaphor; Dylan, as he has done many times before, has generalized from his own personal experiences but, cloaked in allegory, they show more than they tell.  The metaphors are still there - a Dylan song without metaphors would sound like what a fashion model looks like without her makeup, first thing in the morning when she rises.  Like Time out of Mind, Love and Theft grows on you more gradually than his earlier work. 

Each of Dylan's studio albums builds on the foundation of his previous work.  Those of us who grew up with Dylan, and are now growing older with him, share common vectors of life experience with him and each other.  If you're coming late to the party, you should listen to his studio albums in chronological order, if you really want to get what it's all about, because...taken together....Dylan's work is rather like the diary of a generation that didn't bother to keep diaries.

Modern Times is, ironically, a throwback to Dylan's earliest musical roots, the music he listened to growing up in Hibbing, and perfectly amalgamates the tenor of Time Out of Mind with the tone of Love and Theft, striking a balance between metaphor and allegory, between autobiography and oral history, between irony and melancholy, curiously easy to listen to despite the difficult themes it touches upon.   And now, with Together Through Life, he has come around again to the same despondency we first heard in Time Out of Mind, but, now, we are hearing the age in the arrangements, and in his voice itself, along with a literary ambiguity aptly reflected by what may be the most enigmatic album cover Dylan's ever chosen. 

Dylan's voice, in private, was quite melodic.  If you want to hear it clearly, listen to "To Be Alone With You" on Nashville Skyline.  At the beginning of the song, Dylan asks his producer, Bob Johnson, "Is it rolling, Bob?"  As far as I know, this is the only recorded instance of Dylan speaking in his own, normal, speaking voice.  Everywhere else, including the lexicon of his recorded interviews, Dylan assumes the raspy drawling accent that has become his trademark sound.  Now, at the pinnacle of his creative life, his voice itself reflects the pain he sings about.  It's raspier than ever, breathier, labored, and nuanced to the point where one can't help but wonder if this, once again, isn't another put on.

Dylan is justifiably recognized as the premier songwriter of his generation,  but his musicianship and his singing have often been criticized, or overlooked, by those who don't understand the implications of Dylan's work. If you listen to popular music carefully, you will hear trademark Dylan riffs popping all over the place, but don't be alarmed.  Many of them were adapted from the work of previous musicians from earlier eras.  Imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery....but replication not only keeps those old licks alive, but it also pays homage to them.  Some critics, mostly those who ride high horses, periodically excoriate Dylan for having adapted, or even adopted, older works into his own.  If they would only get down off their hobby horses, they might remember that Shakespeare also borrowed early and often from previous scriveners, and never gave any of them the credit that might have thought themselves due, had they been alive to claim it. Dylan, in the tradition of the ancient troubadours, gathers information and influences from other artists, just as they gather the same from him.  Its a symbiotic process.  In Together Through Life, Dylan mentions reading James Joyce.  I can only imagine Dylan plowing through Finnegan's Wake, and wonder what might come of such a collaboration.

But this time around, it's Dylan's voice that demands attention and commands respect.  A lifetime of cultivating the raspy sound that characterizes many of his songs has left the man with a permanent rasp in his voice and, if that's not the case, then this album is a masterpiece of singing skill.  Personally, I think the lifestyle is catching up with him, and that the damage to his pipes is real, not imagined or pretended, but it really doesn't matter because what comes out Dylan's mouth is sheer poetry to music, but then you already knew that, didn't you?

Dylan's complaints about unrequited love, love gone wrong, and the surfeit of love from which he suffers where, once upon a time, about merely human women, but that was a long time ago.  The woman about whom Dylan now speaks in his lyrics, the vain, fickle, promiscuous, self-destructive, and endlessly desirable woman, is nothing less than reality itself. 

Dylan's religious struggles have been well-documented.  There's a good reason for that.  For more than 45 years now, we've been paying Dylan to think about the nature of reality and report his findings back to us.  No matter how much he tries to escape the role, the unwashed phenomenon is the closet thing we have to the ancient Hebrew prophets, who often spoke in metaphor and simile, as Dylan does. 

In the first of the "religious" albums,  1979's "Slow Train Coming," Dylan begins the  "born again phase of his life, which caused great consternation in the American Jewish community, which regards Dylan as one of its treasures. 

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In Sufi literature, romantic love is used as a metaphor for the love of God, and the constant longing for a God that seems either absent or uncaring, and sometimes even hostile to his creation.  Dylan, whether he has ever read about Sufism or not (and I am sure he has), has aptly reframed the nameless woman to whom he addresses himself as "the friend you used to be....so near and dear to me....you slipped so far away," the keynote line from "Life is Hard."  The friend, in Sufi metaphoric language, is God.  In Jewish mysticism, the Shekina is the manifestation of the Divine Presence and is usually characterized as the feminine nature of God.  In Christianity, the same concept is summarized as "The Holy Ghost."


So, Together Through Life is a reference to Dylan's life-long search for spiritual fulfillment...but, wait, there's more:  that nameless woman who appears in so many of Dylan's songs isn't only a religious abstraction.  She's also Dylan's audience, with whom he has been traveling through life, because an artist without an audience is impotent.  When Dylan talks about going together through life, he's not just talking about one woman, or a succession of women.  He's talking about all of us.

Dylan is so unique in the history of the arts that you have to go way back to find anyone who matches Dylan's breath of thought.  Way back.  Go back to your bible and read the Davidic Psalms and you will find an antecedent, a precedent, for Dylan's work.  He might not be the political leader that David was, but he sure does have that same ongoing conversation with God, and the same women troubles.

Despite the temptation to do so, we really can' pose Dylan against Shakespeare.  Some comparisons simply aren't apt.  Nevertheless, both men seemed to have excelled in collaborative efforts, Shakespeare with the members of his theater company, and Dylan  with his various collaborators, and both men demonstrated an unusual breadth of knowledge and interests.

In more recent times, Dylan reminds one of Walt Whitman, both in terms of his poetics, which are very similar, and in terms of the way both men lived their lives.  (Whitman, according to most scholars was gay, but he celebrated his relationships in much the same way that Dylan has celebrated his.)   And in the end, of course, Dylan, like these others before him, has steadfastly resisted the impulse toward self-explanation and, instead, let his work speak for him.  

Once upon a time, Dylan's motto was aptly summarized by the title 1967 film, "Don't Look Back",  but, as Socrates once observed, "an unexamined life is not worth living"  and Dylan, at 68, like the rest of us, is looking back over the incredible events we've seen, heard about, and participated in, as we try to figure out what it all meant, if it meant anything at all.