This project is going to take a long time.
I've listened and relistened to Dylan's third album in all kinds of places. Mostly in two places, though: at home in the living room, and in the car (places that in my research about other people's musical lives here and now turned out to be the two most important places to listen to music today). At home, while ironing kids' clothes, or when I was alone on an evening (kids asleep, wife gone somewhere) - sometimes in the background, sometimes meant for concentrated listening, often something in-between. Never trust listening typologies using the dichotomy concentrated/background, it is the usual kind of simplification researchers use to make the fluid and messy reality of daily life manageable for their own purposes. In the car, while driving long ways (see 'Í like songs' on my other blog) or while driving to the rehearsals of my shanty choir - in the latter case, when I would start at song number 1 when leaving home, I would invariably end in the middle of song nr. 7, 'Boots of Spanish Leather', when I would return home; the song for some time will for me have the connotation not only of being related to 'Girl of the North Country' and 'Scarborough Fair', but also of sitting in my car in front of the house in the dark of Tuesday evenings, engine off but CD-player on, allowing Dylan to finish that particular song.
That's one of the points of keeping this blog; finding out how I - and maybe you, and others - build up a listening history with all the specific and very personal connotations, such as the memory of listening to Dylan's first album intently over the headphones while sitting on a plastic chair in a tent on a camping site in Zeeland province, summer 2014. Or how the songs on the Dylan compilation I bought earlier will keep being connected to those same Tuesday evening drives in the car, especially when I just became a member of the shanty choir and tried frantically to figure out what singing in this choir not only meant to those guys I just started to know, but especially what it did with me, personally, Dylan becoming the soundtrack to all that intensely personal questioning and thus acquiring deep meanings for me on a level that I consider close to the religious.
I have now grown accustomed enough to Dylan's third album to write something about it and then embark on listening to his fourth. So just some words about this third album. I am not going to enumerate all the songs and what they do with me. Somehow at this point of time that doesn't seem appropriate - my listening relation to this album somehow seems to be fragmented, picking up snippets of some songs while having a good feeling of the completeness of other songs.
As I write this sentence, 'When the Ship Comes In' plays - I don't know what it is about, but I love the image of ships coming in, and have the impression that it functions as a semi-religious metaphor, pointing towards later work of Dylan where he sings about his conversion to Christianity. And while writing the last sentence, the Ship-song finished and the next song has started, 'The Lonely Death of Hattie Carrol', which in the chorus addresses the listener directly - "You who philosophize disgrace ... now ain't the time for your tears", turning in the last chorus to "... now is the time for your tears". Such a clever song, so well done, with a verse where Dylan allows himself to end three or four consecutive lines with the word 'table', a kind of rhyme only a master of text-writing can allow himself (what did it mean for him, being a master in his early twenties?).
Many songs are what would be called 'protest songs' - either direct or, by telling stories from life, indirect - but I think that's not the essence of those songs. The essence for me is a deep poetry, which unites the protest songs with the more personal ones such as the lovely last song 'Restless Farewell'. I love the integration in all those songs of folk song qualities such as starting the famous opening/title song with "Come gather round people wherever you roam" and North Country Blues with "Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale".
The record sleeve contains no information on the songs, or song lyrics, but Dylan poetry - "11 Outlined Epitaphs". I haven't read it yet. Will let you know when I've done so.
While listening and relistening to the CD, I renewed my contact with an old acquaintance: a school teacher who supervised my first educational placement when I was about 19 years old. He turns out to be a Dylan fan and sent me a document with some personal remarks combined with prose of writer Martin Bril about his Bob Dylan listening experiences. Just a week ago, a colleague who seems to follow some of my blogging sent me an article from an American newspaper about a speech Dylan recently made, a speech in which he also says things about what he considers his songs to be. I guess my personal Dylan experience will incorporate Ed and Hein in this ever-changing amalgam of my listening biography, which may make my musical behavior maybe a little bit understandable by hindsight but completely unpredictable future-wise.
