How Does Dylan Write His Songs? Blues and Ballads (Dylanology 28, part 2)
As I showed in part 1, in order to write a Dylanesque song we need harmonic simplicity, as a foundation for a vocal delivery that is virtuosic in its handling of the subtle interplay between the different kinds of meaning that the voice can communicate.
But then what? How does one go about to actually write the chords and put them together in a song?
The short answer is: stick to some kind of ballad or blues form – which means using some kind of tonal I–IV–V-harmony or a minor key modal harmony – while exploiting the full potential for variation of these simple skeletons; and last but not least: acquire an immense knowledge of those repertories and their cousins and second cousins.
Songs and Genres
It is an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that all Dylan writes is Blues and Ballads. In terms of songwriting strategies, the ballad is probably the most interesting of these, with its relatively free formal structure, but the Blues – although one of its selling points is the formal simplicity – is actually much more interesting and with much more room for variation than one might think given the restraints. I’ve discussed this in this essay about Dylan and the Dominant.
Strophic Song
What characterizes both of these genres is that they are strophic: songs with verses and refrains and bridges, blocks of lyrics that go with well-defined blocks of music with relatively clear functions, harmonically speaking.
A verse usually begins and ends on the keynote, but there are numerous exceptions. A song such as “Mr Tambourine Man” begins on the IV and ends on V. This works, because if the verse is always followed by a refrain, the refrain is there to bring closure anyway.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is another clear-cut example: the verse ends very emphatically on the V step (on “meal”), whereupon the refrain reinforces the keynote:
“Jokerman” has a different version. The verse does in fact end on the keynote A, but in an inconclusive way, leading directly to the V with which the refrain starts:
The refrain, as indicated, will take the song from wherever the verse ends, and bring closure by returning safely to the keynote again.
In the mid-60s, Dylan discovered the bridge, as a third distinct formal unit: a stanza which isn’t strictly necessary in the song structure, but which enters as a contrasting block. It is there to stir up things, to create contrast, and it will often venture into uncharted territories, harmonically, before it returns to the fold of the keynote again. Dylan’s bridges always end on the V step, in order to prepare the next verse’s entry on the keynote again.
LESSON 8
Be aware of the different functions of the building blocks of a strophic song.
“I’ll See You in Hell, Pachelbel!”
It may seem like a strange thing to emphasise as a prominent feature of Dylan’s song-writing: that he writes strophic songs. Doesn’t everyone? Well, not quite. Compare Dylan’s songs with just about any chart hit from the past twenty years, and it becomes a little clearer why I point this out.
To an overwhelming degree, pop songs today consist of loops of chords – short sequences of chords repeated over and over again, sometimes with slight variations along the way, sometimes not. The most infamous of these is the “four-chord-song” sequence that is alluded to in the original question (I–V–vi–IV).
Axis of Awesome have made a name for themselves by assembling a lot of four-chord songs, but an earlier and funnier version of the same is Rob Paravonian’s “Pachelbel Rant”:
I once went through the top ten Spotify songs to see which harmonic specialties they used. It was almost a futile exercise, because all of them were slight variations on the four-chord theme. James Arthur - Say You Won’t Let Go was one of them. Icona Pop’s All Night was another. Very different songs in character, but harmonically: basically the same song.
With the odd exception (such as “All Along the Watchtower”), Dylan is very different. It’s not just about the four chord loop. More importantly it’s exactly about the lack of a strophic character in the four-chord songs. When the same chords loop through the entire song, there isn’t much of a difference between verse and refrain either (and we get weird categories such as “pre-chorus” to describe what is usually just a change in character or in texture, to give the listener some kind of signpost to attach the attention to, within the constant stream of similarity).
In an average Dylan song, on the other hand, a verse will usually be a self-contained unit, going through a certain harmonic sequence. This sequence may be simple (as it usually is) or more complex, but it will be rounded off in a logical way. Then there will usually be some kind of refrain, either as an independent stanza or as a recurring textual line. There may also be a bridge, also independent, but harmonically speaking just that: a “bridge” back to the tonic of the verse.
Take a simple song like “One More Cup of Coffee”. It may look like a loop song at first – the intro plays four descending chords Am–G–F–E a couple of times, and the verse begins with the same chord sequence, immediately repeated:
But then it goes on:
The last two chords of the descent are played again, but this also means that the pattern of repetition is broken. Thereby, it becomes clear that the repetition has a function in a grander scheme. The repeated Am–G–F–E units are not self-contained – they are a way of building up tension, which is then finally released with the final Am, which immediately returns to the next Am–G–F–E unit:
That’s the difference: “One More Cup of Coffee” is delayed release – “Say you won’t let go” is instant gratification over and over again.
LESSON 9
Always consider whether you want to go for instant gratification or delayed release.
Verse, refrain, and bridge thus serve different functions in Dylan’s song, and they may look very different, but the general principle remains fairly constant: they are independent, self-contained units, following regular patterns that are longer than the simple four-chord loops of pop songs.
Bass Lines and Skeletons Keys
A few more peculiarities are worth mentioning about Dylan’s songwriting. If one compares Dylan’s music to that of e.g. Frank Sinatra or Beethoven, one thing becomes clear: Frankie and Ludwig both rely on a strongly driving harmony: lots of dominant relations (V–I), lots of spicy chords. With Dylan it’s the opposite: he usually avoids the spice in the chords and leaves that to the voice and the phrasing. Rather than exploiting the potential for a purely musical narrative that has developed in Western music thanks, among others, to precisely Frankie and Ludwig, created through harmony, Dylan rather cherishes stable and static blocks of harmony that are allowed to stand for themselves (rather than forcing a resolution in some way or another), as “skeleton keys” upon which the voice is allowed to work its magic. This is why he tends to avoid both dominant chords and especially dominant sevenths.
LESSON 10
If you want to write like Dylan,
stay away from the sevenths and other spicy chords,
and develop your expressive voice instead.
If the previous lesson is quite demanding (because it requires that you develop your phrasing abilities to the level of the greatest phraser since the fourteenth-century genius Guillaume de Machaut), the next one is easier: consider songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Mississippi”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Ring them Bells”, and “Standing in the Doorway”, and even the above-mentioned “One More Cup of Coffee”, “Don’t Think Twice”, and “Emotionally Yours”. What do they have in common?
Right: a steady bass line, up or down.
The examples are quite different: the first two use an ascending line, the rest descending lines in different versions. “Mississippi” spans the entire octave, so does “Ring Them Bells”, only in a much quicker pace. In “Standing in the Doorway” the descent has a static character: it doesn’t lead anywhere other than back to where it came – in “Like a Rolling Stone” the ascent works in exactly the opposite way: as a strong gesture leading to a pronounced, tension-filled V chord.
When we get to songs such as “Don’t Think Twice”, the paradigm gets more vague, since the song doesn’t even use an explicit bass line: the second chord is usually not even played with a d# as the lowest tone, but with the keynote, B. But the sense of the progression is clearly that stepwise descent (marked in blue in the example):
And further demonstration of this can be given through a comparison with “Emotionally Yours”, which has the exact same chord progression, this time with the descent strongly emphasised:
As with all the lessons so far, this is not a magic, secret sauce. The bass lines merely reinforce directional elements that are there already. Thus, there are two different ways to describe this: either, that Dylan favours harmonic patterns with an implicit, underlying scalar bass line, or that he favours scalar bass lines, which tend to produce coherent harmonic movement with a clear sense of direction.
LESSON 11
A blunt, direct bass line can be a good way to create coherence and direction.
The Rolodex of Song
The simplest answer to the original question that sparked this series, lies hidden in one of the sub-questions: «How does he come up with chords to his songs, besides learning from his musical influences and reflecting it in his own music?»
The simple answer is: nothing! There is nothing that explains Dylan’s music making better than this: he is constantly learning from his musical influences and reflecting it in his own music.
That’s the answer that sums up all the previous lessons:
All you have to do to write songs as good as Dylan is to consume, devour, imbibe, breathe in the entire repertory that you’re interested in, preferably at a very young age, so that it sticks firmly to memory and remains in there forever; ruminate on it by constantly revisiting it; then take lessons from it, consciously or – preferably – sub-consciously; and then, as the most natural thing in the world, reflect it in your own music.
As simple as that.
The process does have a couple of requirements with which some people may struggle, but which Dylan masters to perfection.
One is his monomaniacal focus, another is a certain innate musicality that will make the process possible in the first place. And in order to reach Dylan’s level, I think a necessary condition is an immensely good memory, bordering on the mental condition of the savant.
Dylan is the Rolodex of Popular Song. He seems to have a near-complete catalogue of songs in his head, on index cards that pop up automatically when they are needed.
That combination: a super-retentive memory and an almost uncanny ability to bring all those stored memories to the surface and to practical use, is as close as I would dare to go to a definition of genius.
As I wrote in the recent issue about Dylan and the Nobel prize:
In the introduction to her book The Book of Memory, about the role of memory in the literary culture of the Middle Ages, Mary Carruthers compares contemporary descriptions of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Albert Einstein. She finds striking similarities between the way they are described – extraordinary concentration, intricate and brilliant reasoning, originality – but on one point the descriptions differ widely: when it comes to what is perceived as the origin of all these qualities. She writes:
“What is strikingly different is that in the one case [i.e. Einstein] this process and product are ascribed to intuition and imagination unfettered by ‘‘definite’’ tracks, in the other [Aquinas] to a ‘‘rich and retentive memory,’’ which never forgot anything and in which knowledge increased ‘‘as page is added to page in the writing of a book.’’
LESSON 12
Learn the entire corpus of popular music by heart and take as much influence as you can from it, while maintaining a strong artistic independence and integrity.
Pledging One’s Time
This one of the thing that every musician who has played with Dylan says: that his memory and knowledge of the old traditions is uncanny.
Let me therefore end this post with an endorsement: This aspect of Dylan’s art is reflected tremendously well in Ray Padgett’s wonder of a book, Pledging my Time, which is not only an enjoyable collection of interviews, but because of the wide span of musicians whose tongues he has miraculously managed to loosen, actually has become the most interesting Dylan biography I’ve ever read. Probably also the biography that Dylan himself would enjoy the most, because – and this is again to Ray’s credit – it always remains a book about the music, not about juicy anecdotes about the musician.
The best thing is that the book is not the end – there are still more interviews coming through on Ray’s substack, Flagging Down the Double E’s. So if you are not already a subscriber – that’s your own loss.
In the next issues, I will discuss the question Dylan was asked during the San Francisco press conference in 1965: what’s the relationship between lyrics and melody? There will also be a master class by the man himself.