8. Bob DylanBringing It All Back Home
I can’t even remember the first time I heard this record. A couple of years ago, post America, I was listening to this and the lyrics for the first time really hit me. The more surreal ones like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – the lyrics are completely absurd, there’s no chorus. It’s just this rambling psychedelic narrative of nonsense and it’s so perfectly told that you can envision everything that he’s saying and everything that he’s telling you, even though it’s completely abstract and it just really opened up to me what lyrics can do. I don’t really think about the voice or lyrics, I’m just getting into them.
Lyrics can so often ruin a song and I was much more interested in texture, I never really cared so much for my own voice. The human voice not only is an instrument that has the same properties of every other instrument, but it has content and that content can provide so many other things that colour all of the other tones combined. So often they’re so poorly used. What I really liked about ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is that it’s such a crazy rambling. It’s such a psychedelic song. I like to think of the psychedelic realm as being a friend of yours that’s also fucking with you the whole time. In my shows I have these long, rambling psychedelic narratives that are basically complete nonsense, but I never apply it to the lyrics. I keep thinking how lyrics are telling a story, but it’s a story that doesn’t need to have a beginning, middle or end. It’s just a snapshot and Gliss Riffer‘s full of them.
