In my second year of university, I became tight with a group of older friends from school. We bonded over shared aspirations to become musicians; I’d just started writing songs and playing open mic nights around London. One of the group lived on a houseboat in Oxfordshire. Every weekend, we gathered there to drink, listen to music and talk about musicians we loved, heroes whose examples we would follow into new lives. Dylan was our ultimate figurehead. At the end of the night, we would stand around a squat, upright piano and raucously sing “Tangled Up in Blue”.
That was my introduction to Dylan, and his presence immediately informed the fledgling steps I was taking as a musician. My tastes hovered around Desire and Blood on the Tracks, towards the songs with lots and lots of verses. I loved the span of his songwriting – the sweeping, epic lives, with all their lost loves and regrets, located between refrains. Lying on futons, the roar of the A40 in the distance, my friends and I shared instructive Dylan lore. Did you know he replaced the lyrics of old folk songs to teach himself songwriting? Did you know he sometimes wrote hundreds of verses and whittled them down?
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