The Top 5 Bob Dylan Lyrics of All Time
Bob Dylan is deservedly regarded as one of the best songwriters that ever walked the Earth, and the ‘writer’ part of that word is a big reason why. Whether it was the social anthems of his earliest albums, the surrealist poetry of his critically acclaimed trilogy, or the down-to-earth Americana of his post-motorcycle accident albums, he changed the lyrical landscape in countless ways.
You’ve often heard the quip that before Dylan, pop artists were only singing about love, cars, and surfboards, but that is merely scratching the surface. He introduced so many innovative songwriting mechanics drawn from his love of poetry and folk tradition that still reverberate in music today.
Picking out Dylan’s best lines or lyrics is difficult due to the range of emotions he elicits. He makes you feel wonder, disgust, heartbreak, and most of all, jealousy that you’ll never write as well as him.
I tried to capture those lines that are the best representation of why Dylan is so lauded as a songwriter. Of course, I won’t deny that these are my favorites, and there is no objective way I can say that these are his absolute best.
Enough talk, let’s get to it…
“She knows there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all”
This lyric is from the song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” on Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home. This to me is the perfect lyric to demonstrate Dylan’s wordplay, humor, and profundity.
It’s like an old Proverb that you’re not sure makes sense, but deep down, you know it’s wise. It somehow rings true and is absurd at the same time, mixing together to make you laugh and think at the same time.
“Love Minus/Zero No Limit” is one of the Dylan love songs of this period that is not ironic and the complete opposite of the cutting “She Belongs to Me” that opens the album. The song is filled with admiration, and this line is one of the few that is cryptic on the surface. It’s a line you could put in either a love song or a diss song, and it would still work. It’s a true gem, and in a song (and album) full of great lines, it stands above the rest.
“For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing”
Maybe I’m biased toward these lyrics because they’re my favorite part of Dylan’s great social anthem, “Chimes of Freedom,” on his 4th album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
In his early folk albums, Dylan sang for the people and spoke out in a better way about what everyone was thinking and believing. While many would take deserving lines from “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are A Changin,” I think “Chimes of Freedom” is even more universal and life-affirming. He’s speaking up not only for marginalized groups in the 60s but for every hung-up person throughout time and space.
His songs inspired hope for the future or disdain for the present order, but Chimes of Freedom reaches out and takes you by the hand. It’s a song that will be discovered and rediscovered for centuries and still speak powerfully to every social context.
“Buy me a flute
And a gun that shoots
Tailgates and substitutes
Strap yourself
To the tree with roots
You ain’t goin’ nowhere”
This is from “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” on The Basement Tapes, recorded in 1967 with The Band but remaining unreleased until 1975. I honestly could pick from about a thousand lyrics from these sessions, as so many Americana classics are worthy of the list. I love the wordplay of the “cheeks in a chunk” verse on “Million Dollar Bash” or the moving lines of “I Shall Be Released,” but it was this offhand line from “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” that did it for me. The imagery of the whole session was of an ancient America that lived somewhere between history and fiction. Dylan is dropping the surrealist images of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited for more rootsy and grounded pictures.
This line perfectly distills that vision, and the ‘tree with roots’ lyric especially jumps out immediately. If anyone ever accuses Dylan of being a one-note writer who was too verbose, get them a copy of The Basement Tapes.
“And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow”
This is from the song “Mr. Tamborine Man” off the album Bringing It All Back Home. I was not aiming to put out a whole verse as a favorite lyric, but I could not decide what to include from this mesmerizing piece of songwriting. The images connect both to one another and the listener simultaneously to take you to a world that only Dylan could create.
There were a lot of brilliant lines from his surrealist phase, but this one stands out to me as having one foot in human pain and one foot in the mystical stars. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it when Dylan goes full surreal with the chicken sun and the leopard skin pillbox hat, but I’m more impressed when he shows glimpses of the unknowable with grounded language. It’s meaningful, relatable, and surprisingly simple, yet filled with indecipherable imagery and visions. If I was doing a countdown, I think this is the best set of lyrics Dylan ever wrote.
“Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog”
This is from the song that made Allen Ginsberg weep — “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” from The Freewheelin’. I totally understand the emotion from Ginsberg as the song is filled with wonderful emotions and powerful images. I chose these lines specifically because I like the youthful innocence of meeting a fallen world with youthful blue eyes and seeing death everywhere.
Even more than that, the last line is a perfect example of Dylan giving you something you think is understandable yet could also be an image without any meaning. I believe the white man and the black dog are certainly symbols of the Civil Rights movement and the oppression that the youth are witnessing. However, Dylan could have looked out his window and saw a white man with a black dog and put the lyric down off-handed. Again, another reason that I love the little universes that Dylan inhabits and shares with us.
I know I left off about a million brilliant lines, but these are the ones I had to pick when my feet were to the fire — the fire being my own need to proclaim Dylan’s power and impact with words.
Of course, Dylan probably has more words put to song than anyone in history when you think of not only his released studio albums, but the vault of treasures in the bootleg series.
There are hundreds of lyrics that you could choose from. What are some of your favorites?
