Bob Quotes by Jay Michaelson

Except in these latter-day songs, [Bob] Dylan is a grizzled old prophet who's already been to hell and back.

— Jay Michaelson

The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make…

— Jay Michaelson

Probably the high-watermark of [Bob] Dylan's career came after he plugged in his guitar ("Judas!" one fan shouted during a concert) and…

— Jay Michaelson

"Masters of War" [of Bob Dylan] wasn't peacenik, anti-war stuff. With its minor key and uncompromising final lines ("And I hope that…

— Jay Michaelson

Funny thing about Bob Dylan, the newest Nobel laureate in literature: He's been a master of self-invention for more than 50 years,…

— Jay Michaelson

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

— Jay Michaelson

I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to…

— Jay Michaelson

While [Bob] Dylan's folk fans thought he was selling out [in 1965-67], actually Dylan was lodging a stronger, deeper critique of American…

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob] Dylan, like Johnny Cash and only a handful of others, simultaneously embodies the American dream and the harsh wake-up call that…

— Jay Michaelson

There has been a ton of excellent music in this period (along with a few misses), evoking scenes like a bar-room brawl…

— Jay Michaelson

In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North…

— Jay Michaelson

Unlike many Sixties rockers,[Bob] Dylan sang about getting old, about broken dreams. His return to roots music pointed the way for many…

— Jay Michaelson

Folk music had long been political but [Bob] Dylan's poetry took it to a new level.

— Jay Michaelson

Religion is commodified; the educational system is a sham; and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.

— Jay Michaelson

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class…

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the…

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

— Jay Michaelson

The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was…

— Jay Michaelson

Weirdly, by the way,[Bob] Dylan also managed to write several beautiful love songs, like "To Make You Feel My Love" (covered by…

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel…

— Jay Michaelson

More of the symbols are stock (does [Bob] Dylan really have hogs lying out in the mud somewhere? I doubt it), but…

— Jay Michaelson

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

— Jay Michaelson