How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

On his 84th birth­day this past Sat­ur­day, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keep­ing with not only his still-seri­ous tour­ing sched­ule, but also his appar­ent­ly irre­press­ible instinct to work: on music, on writ­ing, on paint­ing, on sculp­ture. Even his occa­sion­al tweet­ing draws an appre­cia­tive audi­ence every time. The Bob Dylan of 2025 is not, of course, the Bob Dylan of 1965, but then, the Bob Dylan of 1965 was­n’t the Bob Dylan of 1964. This con­stant artis­tic change is just what his fans appre­ci­ate, not that they don’t still put on his ear­ly stuff with reg­u­lar­i­ty.

In the ear­li­est of that ear­ly stuff, as music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley explains in the new video above, Dylan “wrote songs by rein­vent­ing tra­di­tion.” Using noth­ing but his voice, gui­tar, and har­mon­i­ca, the young Dylan “imi­tat­ed some of the most well-known folk melodies,” plac­ing him­self in that long Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of bor­row­ing and rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. But as dra­ma­tized in the recent film A Com­plete Unknown, he soon “went elec­tric,” and with the change in instru­men­ta­tion came a change in song­writ­ing method: “He would just come up with end­less pages of lyrics, some­thing he once called ‘the long piece of vom­it.’ ”

The advice to “puke it out now and clean it up lat­er” has long been giv­en, in var­i­ous forms, to aspir­ing artists every­where. One aspect worth high­light­ing about the way Dylan did it was that, despite writ­ing pop­u­lar songs, he drew a great deal of inspi­ra­tion from more tra­di­tion­al lit­er­a­ture, to the point that his notes hard­ly appear to con­tain any­thing resem­bling vers­es or cho­rus­es at all. Only in the stu­dio, with a band behind him, could Dylan give these ideas their final musi­cal shape — or rather, their final shape on that par­tic­u­lar album, often to be mod­i­fied end­less­ly, and some­times rad­i­cal­ly, over decades of live per­for­mances to come.

Hart­ley tells of more dra­mat­ic changes to Dylan’s music and his process of cre­at­ing. The motor­cy­cle crash, the Base­ment Tapes, the open E tun­ing, Blood on the Tracks: all of these now lie half a cen­tu­ry or more in the past. To go over all the ways Dylan has approached music since then would require more hours than all but the most rabid enthu­si­asts (though there are many) would watch. The video does include a 60 Min­utes clip from 2004 in which Dylan says that “those ear­ly songs were almost mag­i­cal­ly writ­ten,” and that he would­n’t be able to cre­ate them any­more. But then, nor could the Dylan of High­way 61 Revis­it­ed have record­ed Time Out of Mind, and nor, for that mat­ter, could the Dylan of Time Out of Mind have record­ed any of Dylan’s albums from this decade — or those that could, quite pos­si­bly, be still to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in Col­orized 1963 Footage

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Com­pare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Com­plete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.