24-05-2025
Happy birthday Bob! A guide to Dylan's best narrative songs
Analysis: To mark Dylan's birthday this weekend, a decade by decade guide to the songs showing the master storyteller's narrative strengths
With the recent release of the Timothée Chalamet -starring biopic A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan's popularity has undergone a resurgence lately. While the film tells the true story of Dylan's rise to fame, it leaves out one crucial fact: Dylan himself is a master storyteller.
Dylan's career is defined by stratospheric highs, interminable lows and endless reinventions. He's been a folkster, a country rocker, a born-again bible-beater and even a singer of nursery rhymes, both traditional and original (1990's Under the Red Sky, an album written for his youngest child at the time).
And he's still going. Dylan has been on the Never-Ending Tour ever since 1988 (covering The Pogues' A Rainy Night In Soho lately). He's only took a single year off touring since and that was 2020, when the entire world ground to a halt. Even still, it was the year Dylan released his album Rough and Rowdy Ways, which ranks among his finest.
Beyond his divisive vocals (memorably described by Haruki Murakami in his 1985 novel End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland as sounding "like a little kid staring out the window at the rain"), Dylan's entire discography is defined by his rich literary style. His lyrics are witty, intelligent and often narrative. Over the past 60 years, Dylan has penned strange and sometimes difficult to follow stories – for which he was eventually awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. Although controversial at the time, the award was entirely deserved. Here's a list featuring a single song from each decade showing Dylan's narrative strengths and abilities.
1960s
Honourable mentions: Desolation Row, Talkin' World War III Blues, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
In this song, which is criminally absent from A Complete Unknown, Dylan gives an account of the real-life murder of a black barmaid by a wealthy young white man. Literary critic and leading Dylan scholar Christopher Ricks counts it among Dylan's finest songs, referring to his subtle invocation of biblical imagery. An angry, embittered, and deeply political song, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll builds to the reveal of the murderer's punishment: a mere six month's imprisonment.
1970s
Honourable mentions: Hurricane, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Black Diamond Bay, Romance in Durango
Co-written with clinical psychologist and theatre director Jacques Levy, Isis tells the story of a mysterious graverobber and his troubled marriage. The song is set in an unfamiliar land, with sloped pyramids "embedded in ice" and harkens to fantasy and myth like Lovecraft's The Quest of Iranon or the Odyssey. Like the Odyssey, Isis tells the story of an ambitious man separated from his wife, recounting his adventures and journey home.
The song is a true epic, accompanied by one of Dylan's finest vocal performances. Isis was released during a particularly strong narrative period for Dylan; the album on which it features, 1976's Desire is packed with stories of thwarted love, doomed people and miscarriages of justice.
1980s
Man In the Long Black Coat
Dylan is unusually candid in his discussion of this track in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, describing the song as his version of Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line: "a song he'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable points". Man in the Long Black Coat tells a story familiar to folk standards like Black Jack Davy – a woman leaves her partner for a mysterious interloper – but Dylan conjures a unique sort of menace that sets it apart.
Highlands
Honourable mentions: Handy Dandy, Tryin' to Get to Heaven
A nearly seventeen-minute track, Highlands demonstrates Dylan's novelistic command of dialogue. The song comes to life during a conversation between the speaker of the song and a waitress in a Boston restaurant around the six-minute mark. The conversation reads as an allegory for Dylan's sometimes contentious relationship to the press: the speaker, by various means, attempts to deny the woman's requests of him, echoing Dylan's sometimes difficult interview style. His dialogue is clipped and sparse, recalling the work of Cormac McCarthy, while retaining a wry knowingness that is all his own.
2000s
Ain't Talkin'
Honourable mentions: Mississippi, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, Thunder on the Mountain
A song in which Dylan's speaker wanders through a seemingly corrupted idyll. As a narrative, the song is sparse. As an allusive poem, the song is as dense as Dylan has ever managed – managing to reference Wild Mountain Thyme in the same breath as biblical apocalypses. A bubbling sense of unease haunts the song, which ends up feeling like a snapshot of a cold, dead world bereft of light and good.
2010s
Tin Angel
Honourable mentions: Tempest, Scarlet Town
Of all the songs featured here, Tin Angel is perhaps the most direct in its storytelling. It also feels familiar; Dylan is replaying his old tricks here, returning to the narrative of the runaway bride. But this time, there is progression – the spurned husband confronts his wife and her new lover. The dialogue is again the highlight: Dylan conjures three distinct character voices, interchanging between the three in a climactic argument. The resolution of the song is as grim as Dylan has ever gotten. Listen with the lights down low.
2020s
Murder Most Foul
Dylan's longest track to date (thirty seconds longer than Highlands), Murder Most Foul is a challenging song: 17 minutes, no chorus, and a sparse arrangement of hushed, meditative piano and percussion. Named after a quote from Hamlet, it finds Dylan retelling the assassination of JFK. The song later introduces late radio DJ Wolfman Jack as a character, imagining conversations between Kennedy and Wolfman in the afterlife. The song is at once an elegy, a conspiracy, and a masterpiece.
