Bob Dylan gave a brief look into his tune composing process, remarked on the demise of George Floyd and said in a meeting on Friday that he wished he had composed the Rolling Stones ballad ‘Angie.’
Dylan’s wide-running discussion with the New York Times was his first significant meeting since 2017 and came week ahead of the arrival of his first album of in eight years.
However, the man viewed as one of the world’s most influential musicians gave not much information about what persuaded his spray of inventiveness or the implications behind the new melodies that are loaded down with mainstream society references from the most recent five decades.
Rough and Rowdy Ways will be released June 19. Dylan, 79, released three singles not long ago, including a 17-minute track, ‘Murder Most Foul,’ propelled by the death in 1963 of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Dylan said the songs came from a stream of consciousness. “Most of my recent songs are like that. The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them,” he told U.S. historian Douglas Brinkley in the interview.
Referring to the death of African American George Floyd who was pinned under the knee of a white police officer in May, Dylan said it “sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that. It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.”
Asked which Stones songs Dylan wished he could have written, he replied, “Maybe ‘Angie,’ ‘Ventilator Blues’ and what else, let me see. Oh yeah, ‘Wild Horses’.”
