Bob Dylan

Interview at the Oxford Union
"Life in Music"

I was very intrigued by Bob Dylan and how for every point you can make about why Bob Dylan is brilliant, you could make another counterpoint as to why you would never want to include Bob Dylan in your dreams of being a musician. Because of one reason or another. It's just a great thing to do to look at somebody that you really admire almost to the point of, you know, obsession, and humanize them and break it down and look at it. Instead of looking at something thirty years after its heyday where everything gets crystallized into brilliant, awesome, he went electric and everybody went, "boo" and he went, "yeah take it!" and the world went, "yeah we love it." 

Well you have to break that down and get into it and look at it linear, look at it like you're in that moment looking forward. So I went to Wikipedia, [Laughter] and I took every single record he ever put out, the year it came out, and the top chart position that it got to, and I graphed it. It went from like one to seventy-something so that was how wide it was. And I went across this way and this thing goes like, it looks like an EKG going across. Now if you're only honing in on one moment from where it goes from three to twenty on the chart, it's moving about a half an inch. But if you have just put a record out that has underperformed, quote-unquote, so that now you've slipped. Imagine going from three to twenty this year. The press will eat you alive, he's done, your label will drop, they'll say he's a has been, never mind, good night, on to the next guy. Oh, these three clones, one's a DJ, other one does backflips," oh that's really impressive, fine.

[Laughter] 

But your attention will shift. But if you look at it like this, that becomes the most impressive shape your career can possibly take. One, four, twenty, four, seventy, seventy-four, thirty, one. That's to me I think the way that you can be around forever is not to do whatever it takes to hook yourself to the number one position, because if you do that then the constant is number one at the expense of the variable being whatever it takes to be number one. And that's also a ticket out. It's a ticket out.

Interview on World Cafe
Interview with Talia Schlanger on World Cafe (NPR)

TS: So it was a deliberate decision to take a break from pop for a little while to begin with?

JM: I think it's a decision to take a break from that sound. ... I started listening to Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young) and Neil Young and The Band, and I'm just nervy. And I listen to stuff, and I don't like the fact that I'm not doing it. ... It almost literally gets under my skin and I can't stop moving and I get antsy and I go, "Let me at it."

Twitter Q&A (November 2017)
Twitter Q&A about Born and Raised

I hear a lot of Dylan influences in B&R, especially his 70’s phase, what part did his influence play in the making of th album?

Laying in Philly. 2010 summer tour. A tough one. Watched “No Direction Home” and that was it. I would retire and start again. Why not?

Podcast interview with Dean Delray
Let There Be Talk, Part 1 of 2, Episode #501

It just so happened at the end of the summer tour of 2010 I discovered No Direction Home, the Bob Dylan documentary. Maybe the very first modern digital documentary that blew my mind.

DD: That thing. "Ballad of a Thin Man" on that movie is a game changer.
 
JM: For me it’s when he did "Forever Young" in The Last Waltz. It changed my life again. And I was at the end of the Battle Studies tour, it was 2010 and I was laying in a hotel bed—maybe I was in Philly or something, I'll never forget it. My feet started going under the covers and I was watching Bob Dylan and I went, “I'm done. I'm done. I have to, I have to know what this music is. I have to know what this music is. I can't believe I have to keep touring right now, I can't believe it. This is it, this is it for me.” I watched him play all these songs and I just went, this is it for me. This is my future, this is where I want to live. There's honesty here. This person is not interested in the things I've been interested in.

Podcast interview with Dean Delray
Let There Be Talk, Part 2 of 2, Episode #502

DD: Yeah. Let's get into that Stagecoach stuff.

JM: Yeah the Stagecoach so, I'm watching "No Direction Home" and I'm just blown away, just everything in me is different. And I look at Dylan playing this slotted headstock 12-fret tiny body country guitar and he's singing—is it called "Medgar Evers Blues?" I think that's what it's called. And he's at this protest or something. I'm looking at the guitar he's playing. It sounded like a million dollars on him. I'm like “that guitar’s gorgeous.” So I start looking up 00 guitars.

Rise For the River: Flood Benefit Concert
Performance of Born and Raised album

So I thought, in keeping with the spirit of Born and Raised, I'll play a cover song that meant a lot to me when I was writing that record. Probably a song that inspired me in one way or another. It's a Bob Dylan song.

[Plays "Buckets of Rain"]

Radio Intros 2023
LIFE With John Mayer on Sirius XM Radio
You know, that song ["The Man in Me"] reminds us all that if you don't quite have the lyrics you need at the end of a song, "la la la" will do just fine. Bob Dylan's a great "la la la" guy. We always forget, sometimes all you need is some "la la la"s.
Excerpted from Radio Intros 2023 >