WHAT DID YOU HEAR?

A dive into the chords, not just the words, of the Dylan canon.

This an exploration of why the “crackin’ breakin’ shakin’ sounds,” as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics—and fans—focus on. Making well-argued points that sometimes get lost in academic prose, Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various components—vocals, guitar, harmonica—that enhance the picture. He quotes Richard Manuel of the Band dismissing Dylan’s guitar work—“he’s a strummer”—and notes blues purists copping an attitude about his singular harmonica styles. The author occasionally references French postmodern structuralists, though his New Criticism forebears seem equally applicable to his approach, which often includes note-by-note analyses of the changes in different performances and recordings. (He also references Quora posts and other Dylan fanboy message boards in the course of these obsessive travels.) Luckily, he includes links to the snatches of songs he writes about, which should make it easier for the lay reader to follow along at home. To demonstrate the inseparability of sound and sense, Rings quotes the original notation, “Words-Music,” that Dylan used as he typed out “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in a borrowed Greenwich Village apartment, refuting the urban legend that the original draft was intended to be a poem. Liner notes are not Nobel-worthy. “Dylan’s idiosyncratic sounds are not incidental to his art, a troublesome husk we can discard once we have extracted his celebrated words,” the author writes. “Rather, his art lives in the noisy encounter between words and music.”

Worthy fare for Dylan obsessives and (patient) casual fans alike.