That is a very, very good article. Makes perfect sense to me. Like I always say, he just writes that stuff naturally. It wasn't a case of deciding he was gonna write "protest" or deciding he was gonna write this or that. It just naturally happened at the time, because that's what was moving through him. And it all grew out of the incredibly rich musical heritage of the past that preceded Bob Dylan and which he absorbed like a sponge when he was very young.

The one thing I learned from him about songwriting was: just let it happen. The song (or the ghost behind it) does the writing for you if you just let it happen.

I hear songs all the time that people write which are calculated, carefully calculated, according to a prior expectation that they had in their mind. Sometimes the craft is great, sometimes the execution is marvelous, but that stuff seldom moves me, because it was contrived by the mind. It didn't grow naturally out of its own untouchable mystery, which is utterly beyond the calculating mind.

You can't contrive a prearranged idea of some kind and write a song that floats free and totally real around it. A song like "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" floats free. It's incredible, and no one could have contrived it. It moves around a feeling, not a calculated idea...but it sparks all kinds of wonderful ideas and images.

Real songs are not written to satisfy an existing market of any kind or to reach someone's imagined artistic benchmark...they are their own sole reason for being. They change the market irrevocably, because they are far more powerful than it is and far more lasting. The market has the memory (and moral conscience) of a gnat, and its typical mainstream creations last about as long, comparatively speaking. Real songs, like real literature, can last almost forever.

- LH