The Lyrics
by Bob Dylan
Summary
The Lyrics collects six decades of Bob Dylan's songs as text on the page, stripped of melody and performance and left to stand as writing alone. The book moves roughly chronologically, opening with the protest songs of the early 1960s, moving through the dense, surreal, image driven writing of the mid 1960s that made Dylan's reputation as something more than a topical songwriter, and closing with later work that returns deliberately to older American musical forms, blues, folk hymn, talking song. Reading the lyrics without the music running underneath them changes what stands out: compression and internal rhyme carry more of the weight on the page than they need to in performance, where a melody can do some of that work instead.
What the book demonstrates across its full length is the range of tradition Dylan draws on and reworks, biblical language sitting beside carnival barker patter, nineteenth century American folk forms beside surrealist imagery borrowed from French poetry he read as a young man in Greenwich Village. The current edition, retitled The Lyrics: 1961 to 2012 for its 2016 printing, gathers material first collected in Lyrics: 1962 to 1985, then expanded in Lyrics: 1962 to 2001 in 2004 and The Lyrics: Since 1962 in 2014, each edition adding later songs to what came before.
Reading it cover to cover means watching one writer's vocabulary and preoccupations shift across fifty years without the benefit of hearing a single note of it sung, which is either a loss or a clarifying exercise depending on how well you already know the recordings. It suits a reader who wants to test whether song lyrics can carry weight as literature on their own, a question the book itself never quite settles and was not designed to.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Bob Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, the first time the literature prize went to a songwriter rather than a novelist, poet or playwright in the conventional sense. The choice split literary opinion immediately: the French writer Pierre Assouline called it contemptuous of writers, while Salman Rushdie and Stephen King both publicly welcomed it.
Dylan himself said nothing for roughly two weeks after the announcement before telling the journalist Edna Gundersen the news was amazing, incredible, adding that he never dreamed of something like that happening. He did not travel to the December 2016 ceremony in Stockholm, citing prior commitments; the United States ambassador to Sweden read his acceptance speech, and Patti Smith performed one of his songs with orchestral accompaniment in his place. Dylan posted his required Nobel lecture on June 5, 2017, just ahead of the six month deadline the Academy sets for collecting the prize money.