Ah, the guest blog of a guest blogger. Does it get any better than that? Conor, probably not to Ryan’s knowledge, has given me the opportunity to post something for him here. And, being more excited by the prospect of writing for muzzle of bees right now than posting in my own blog, I’ve decided to take him up on it. So partly in anticipation of the quickly-approaching chance to hear Modern Times, and partly in a plea that sometimes good music is more than just the latest catchy tune, I’ve decided to post a little “Bob Dylan theme time” of my own.

Another Side of Bob Dylan time and again stands as my favorite Dylan album. Of course I’ve gone through phases where Blood on the Tracks or Highway 61 have been played over and over for weeks at a time, but for some reason I always come back to Another Side. It’s not that the singing is particularly great (even I could probably croon better than “all I really want to dooooooooooo”), it’s the content, the words, and the way which Bob, still in his early stages but gaining confidence, presents them. It’s comparable evolution-wise to Rubber Soul in that Dylan seems to be just warming up to some of the more crazy things to come. My two favorite Dylan songs of all time are on this album: I Don’t Believe You (live video here) and Chimes of Freedom, and I think that overall the themes and moods Dylan evokes are some of his best: confused love, brutal honesty, hopelessness combined with a spark of hope, and a touch (just a touch) of the bizarre.

And because I like my Dylan so much, particularly this album, I have been delighted to discover some of these exact themes being replicated, or at least approximated, in some music of late. Here are three good ones, and a little bit about each song they appear in.

Theme #1: The elusive lover.
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) is at the same time complex and simple—sung from the voice of a young lover who wakes to find the woman he took home the night before has vanished without a trace. He can’t figure out why she would have up and left him without a word, as he can’t remember doing anything wrong. What I like so much about the song, for some reason, is its one sidedness, as you just know the woman has an entirely different story.

Enter M. Ward’s Magic Trick, from Post War. A slightly more up-tempo take (that’s also about a third of the length as IDBY), but the idea’s the same. Here’s this girl that all of the sudden up and takes off when things are seemingly going well (“She’s got one magic trick, just one and that’s it, she disappears”). And, like Dylan in I Don’t Believe You, Ward generalizes his experience (“people come, and people go, sometimes without goodbye, sometimes without hello”), seemingly to reassure himself that he is not the only one experiencing this frustrating phenomenon. A bonus is that this song is amazingly catchy.

Theme #2: The personality switch:

To Ramona touches on something that apparently happens all the time (at least in fiction): one person “changes” in a relationship, which leaves the other half wondering what the hell happened. It comes up in novels, movies, and not-too-quality TV episodes. In this song Bob sings the thoughts of the confused half, the one who has been left behind in the wake of the other’s changes. He half-bitterly and half-desperately tries to point out to his lover that what she now believes isn’t who she really is. (“I can see that your head has been twisted and fed by worthless foam from the mouth”) But in the end, he gives up, hoping his lover will see things as they really are, but knows that she must do this on her own.

Forty years later, Conor Oberst sings a similar tune with Make War. This was probably the first Bright Eyes song I ever heard and continues to be one of my favorites. Despite the song’s upbeat rhythm, building energy, and a chorus that encourages you to sing along, it is truly a remorseful song about the loss of love. On this song, Oberst pleads, not unlike Dylan, for the woman he has known for so long to “return, return, to the person that you were.” Equally bitter, Conor gives up on the person who once was his second half, encouraging her to run to the person she now loves, even though this person will “make war on who you were before, and claim all that has spoiled in your heart.”

Theme #3: The crazy ramblin’ man who encounters the surreal:

This, of course, is a great theme, and one that only gets its beginnings on Another Side of Bob Dylan—over the course of Dylan’s next three albums it takes off with furious speed. There are two songs on Another Side which hint at the beginnings of the madness: Motorpsycho Nightmare and I Shall be Free #10. Both tout ridiculous situations, playful rhythm and rhyme, and bizarre allusions.

There are few artists out there who can pull off quality loose association lyrics with such style and presence as Bob Dylan, but one who clearly masters this talent is the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. Pulling from an enormous storehouse of cultural references, Finn’s lyrics are fresh, entertaining, and often downright funny. I think the closest approximation to the hopeless traveler at the mercy of who he meets on the road in Dylan’s Motorspycho Nightmare (although not necessarily my favorite Finn song) is The Swish—a tale of passing from town to town, girl to girl, filled with drunken and drugged up nights, and surreal-like characters. For a complete interpretation of Finn’s sometimes obscure references, NPR (for some reason) has done a good job here.

So there you go. I’m not really sure what the point of this whole exercise has been other than me getting a chance to write about some damn good lyrics and a few good tunes. Sometimes the music is just about the music, and sometimes, if it touches you the right way, it can be about just a little bit more.

-Lauren