But in so doing he has made the meaning of the lyrics more obscure – and that gives an interesting effect. We see it happening throughout his songs, but it is particularly interesting in My Back Pages because of the other issues that Dylan is seeking to resolve here.Ĭlinton Heylin adds to this perspective on the song the notion that Dylan changed quite a few of the lines as he worked on the piece just prior to recording, simply to make it easier to sing, and to make the words easier to understand. This is the dilemma all artists face with all works – and it is what Dylan was referring to in his comment. The resultant book was not the novel I imagined when I started. And I gave the journalist and the fictional characters he met lives – during those nine months they became real people. I knew more or less what happened that year, but during the nine months it took to write the book I discovered a lot more and those discoveries forced me to twist the actions of the characters quite a bit. When I wrote the novel “Making the Arsenal” for example, I knew it was going to be the story of a fictional journalist in London in 1910, and would trace the events of what was a momentous year. I would never in a 100 lifetimes suggest that I am a creative artist of singular note, but I can give the briefest explanation of this from my own experience as a novelist. In this comment Dylan notes the two opposing routes between which all creative artists make a choice – plotting and planning the work (in whatever form it is) before one starts, or letting it happen. The implication is that he started writing and let the song itself direct where matters were going. In 1965 Dylan made a comment to the effect that he used to know what he wanted to write about before starting a song, but that since then he has taken a different route.

My back pages by the byrds