I’m a Religious Person: Deciphering the Role of Religion in Bob Dylan’s Life and Work
On December 19, 2022, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy interview with Bob Dylan. The occasion was Dylan’s new book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which had been released the previous month. Conducted by musician-turned-journalist Jeff Slate, this interview resembles a number of such conversations with Dylan over the years—expansive, compelling, and more than a little enigmatic. For example, when asked about his interest in contemporary music, Dylan namechecks a veritable motley crew of artists: “I’m a fan of Royal Blood, Celeste, Rag and Bone Man, Wu-Tang, Eminem, [and] Nick Cave.”[1] One might wonder if this list is intentionally recherché, but Dylan insists that eclectic musical talent seems to find him. This statement seems all the more true when Dylan improbably adds that he has drawn inspiration from both Moravian Duets (Moravské dvojzpěvy, 1875-81) by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák and “Chip Away” (2019) by Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan.
At other junctures, however, the conversation turns more serious. When pressed about the various catalysts for The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan dismisses the notion that media streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify have played a role. His book is a “state of mind,” which emerges out of a life “detached from trends.” In fact, Dylan explains, he is prone to take naps, and his screen-time is minimal. When he does watch television, he prefers understated British series such as the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (1960-) and the period detective drama Father Brown (2013-). While acknowledging that his habits and tastes betray his octogenarian status—Dylan will be 84 years old on May 24, 2025—he contends that age is not the main factor. As he explains:
I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.
Later in the interview, after being asked why he has continued to tour well into his 80s, Dylan responds that “destiny put some of us on that path, in that position.” This comment would seemingly align with his claim to be “a religious person,” but, lest someone confuse the point, Dylan returns to it a final time. Slate asks, “What style of music do you think of as your first love?” Dylan answers, “Sacred music, church music, ensemble singing.”
For the casual Dylan fan—the kind of person who knows the singer-songwriter’s most famous singles (“The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and so on) and who owns the almost ubiquitous 1967 album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits—such comments may seem puzzling. What happened to the great countercultural icon of the 1960s? Has old age tamed him at last? In truth, however, Dylan’s interest in religion spans not only the length of his artistic career but of his entire life. In my recent book Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence (2023), I set out to demonstrate this point in a variety of ways, surveying Dylan’s religious background and interests as well as arguing that his vast catalog of songs can be profitably read in light of Søren Kierkegaard’s famous concept of the “spheres of existence” (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious). While the latter contention is complex, I daresay that it marks an original contribution to Dylan interpretation—a burgeoning academic discipline that, with the founding of the Bob Dylan Center in May 2022, promises to grow in the coming years. And yet, even if this is true, the casual fan may still ask herself, “Wait, Dylan and religion—that’s a thing?”
The goal of this essay, then, is to provide a foothold into the topic. First, I will show that the back half of Dylan’s career, irrespective of his Jewish upbringing and public conversion to Christianity in the late 1970s, occasions such a line of inquiry. In other words, Dylan’s entire career arc, and not just a few scattered biographical moments, testifies to his abiding interest in religion. Second, I will position my Kierkegaardian reading of Dylan’s oeuvre in relation to other prominent works on the subject, especially Sir Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003) and Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America (2010). The main contention here will be that Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence expands and deepens the respective approaches of Ricks and Wilentz. The upshot is not a reductive interpretation of Dylan, whereby religion becomes the only significant theme in his catalog, but rather a portrait of an artist who is an astute observer of the human condition in all of its manifold complexity.
Religion Amid Dylan’s Late-Career Renaissance
In July 1984, Dylan began recording the follow-up to his acclaimed 1983 album Infidels. His music career was now more than two decades old, but, amazingly, he was not yet to its midpoint. From Empire Burlesque (1985) to Shadow Kingdom (2023), Dylan has subsequently issued 18 studio albums. Moreover, since 1988, Dylan has toured with unprecedented regularity, playing over 3,000 shows in 30 years—or almost two shows per week. Often referred to as the Never Ending Tour, it has added to Dylan’s mystique as a wandering poet or preacher, though Dylan has cast it in different terms: “Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire. . . . Every man should learn a trade. It’s different than a job.”[2] Dylan has stayed active in other ways as well, co-writing and starring in the offbeat drama Masked and Anonymous in 2003, publishing his memoir Chronicles: Volume One in 2004, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and even developing a line of whiskeys—conspicuously named Heaven’s Door—in 2018.[3] While it may be true that Dylan is best remembered for his work in the 1960s and 1970s, his subsequent career has been anything but uneventful. One might even argue that, despite its ups and downs, this latter period represents a crystallization of Dylan’s artistic capacity. This point can be seen across a handful of key developments and ongoing questions.
First, while the mid- and late-1980s represented the nadir of Dylan’s critical and popular standing, it was a period of personal crisis as well. As the evangelical frisson that propelled Dylan’s so-called “Gospel Period” began to fade, Dylan doubted his next step. Empire Burlesque was “produced to attract radio listeners and MTV viewers,” while Knocked Out Loaded (1986) exemplified “a musical melting pot,” with Dylan recording “over several months in a number of different studios with different teams of musicians from very different backgrounds.”[4] The then-unreleased track “Blind Willie McTell” charted a way forward—one that Dylan would ultimately take—but he did not see it yet. As he explains in retrospect:
I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. . . . Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent.[5]
The trouble had more to do with the proper vehicle for Dylan’s music than with the music itself. Dylan collaborated with artists and producers from a host of genres, including synth-pop (Arthur Baker and Dave A. Stewart), psychedelia (Grateful Dead), and heartland rock (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), not to mention his participation in supergroups USA for Africa and the Traveling Wilburys. None of it seemed to work. While on the Temples in Flames Tour in 1987, Dylan performed gospel-period songs such as “In the Garden” and “Dead Man, Dead Man” and, in Tel Aviv, even covered the traditional spiritual “Go Down Moses.” Yet, backed by Petty and playing in front of mass audiences, he felt indifferent to the material: “Night after night it was like I was on cruise control. . . . Even at the Petty shows I’d see the people in the crowd and they’d look like cutouts from a shooting gallery.”[6] What he needed was a new way of approaching his music, and the answer turned out to be the Never Ending Tour—an idea that Dylan has likened to “start[ing] up again” and “put[ting] myself in the service of the public.”[7] Almost constant touring would liberate Dylan from the pressures of being a rock star and put the emphasis back on the songs themselves, which, moreover, he was now committed to playing in a different musical style—one that he claims to have borrowed from blues greats Lonnie Johnson and Robert Johnson.[8]
This last point denotes the next major development in Dylan’s career: long hailed as an artistic trailblazer and rugged individualist, he would immerse himself in the accomplishment and ethos of past masters. Dylan had been toying with this idea at least since Down in the Groove (1988), which covers several tracks by other artists, including R&B singer Wilbert Harrison and pop songsmith Richard A. Whiting. But the trend became unmistakable with Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), back-to-back collections comprised entirely of covers from the folk and blues traditions. In one sense, Dylan was revisiting his own musical origins: “This was, to some extent, a return to the beginning, meaning Dylan’s first albums from Bob Dylan to Another Side of Bob Dylan.”[9] But it was also a commentary on Dylan’s understanding of the contemporary music scene and of his place in it. Whatever had been deemed fashionable by record-label executives and pop-music gurus—and, in the 1990s, that especially meant grunge and hip-hop—Dylan was not interested. Even his own songcraft would “take inspiration from his glorious predecessors, Charley Patton and Slim Harpo,” exhibiting the “enormous artistic debt contemporary musical artists owe to the pioneers of American popular music.”[10] Indeed, with this in mind, Dylan would release a string of revisionist blues-rock albums, each with a different personality—the melancholy Time Out of Mind (1997), the impish Love and Theft (2001), the mystical Modern Times (2006), the mercurial Together Through Life (2009), and the foreboding Tempest (2012). For many critics, this is one of the strongest sequences in Dylan’s career, rivaling (if not besting) his run of classic albums in the 1960s.
Dylan’s success during the late 1990s and the first decades of the twenty-first century fostered a third major late-career development, namely, his status as an ambassador for classic Americana. It is, indeed, a kind of paradox: the man whose creative genius would not be bound by folk music has used the twilight of his career to stress its timeless validity. He has even stepped outside of his presumptive wheelhouse—the songs of a Woody Guthrie or a Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”)—to promote the canon of pop and jazz standards that dominated American radio from the 1920s to the 1950s. Often referred to as the “Great American Songbook,” this was the soundtrack of Dylan’s parents’ generation, including orchestral pieces by composers such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington and enduring vocal interpretations by crooners such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald. Dylan’s efforts to revive interest in classic Americana have been varied.
From May 2006 to April 2009, he hosted a weekly satellite radio show called Theme Time Radio Hour. There were 101 episodes in all, each centered on an overarching subject such as “Baseball” and “War.” For his part, Dylan played the role of disc jockey, not only selecting songs but also serving as “instructor of music appreciation, biographer, comedian, commentator, and dispenser of recipes, household hints, and other bits of useful information.”[11] The show has been categorized as an American version of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81),[12] and, in some ways, Dylan does take his duties as DJ seriously, offering interesting background information and occasionally tendering his own critical appraisal of an artist or song. Still, the essence of Theme Time Radio Hour is that of “an old-time radio show,” which highlights “a great deal of music that one doesn’t hear on the radio anymore.”[13] Sure, Dylan mixes in the odd contemporary tune, but most of the tracks are culled from traditional sources—folk, blues, country, western swing, garage rock, gospel, “various crooners from the 1930s through the 1950s,” and so on.
Apart from its own merits, Theme Time Radio Hour was the impetus for additional Dylan projects. The show had consistently demonstrated that Judeo-Christian themes infused popular American music: there were episodes on overt theological topics such as “The Devil,” “The Bible,” “Christmas and New Year’s,” and “Noah’s Ark,” as well as several installments that educed religious questions and sources such as “Wedding,” “Time,” and “Death and Taxes.” Airing on December 20, 2006, Dylan’s Christmas episode was particularly notable, not only due to its extended running time and apparent popularity (it would be re-aired on Christmas Eve, 2008), but also because it would precipitate Dylan’s own contribution to the Christmas music genre—the 2009 album Christmas in the Heart. Blending “traditional carols (roughly one-quarter of the album) with Tin Pan Alley holiday songs,” and evoking “the benign spirit of Bing Crosby,”[14] Christmas in the Heart nonplussed the music press, who oddly failed to see its connections to Dylan’s musical and religious proclivities. As Sean Wilentz puts it, “The album contains not a single ironic or parodic note. It is a sincere, croaky-voiced homage to a particular vintage of popular American Christmas music, as well as testimony to Dylan’s abiding faith: hence, its title.”[15]
Much of Dylan’s work over the last decade can be aptly summed up as “homage.” Taken from the Old French omage, it originally indicated the allegiance shown by a vassal to a feudal lord. The one who does homage, then, is one who declares obligation and gratitude. Dating back to his early folk years, when he was known as a disciple of Woody Guthrie, Dylan has never shied away from showing respect to his artistic touchstones. Still, if nods to the Great American Songbook were unassuming on Theme Time Radio Hour, sprinkled as they were among songs from other genres and traditions, Dylan has recently paid direct homage to pop standards and, in particular, to the most celebrated representative of that tradition: Frank Sinatra. Over the past decade, Dylan has devoted three studio albums to interpretations of the Great American Songbook. The first two of these recordings, Shadows in the Night (2015) and Fallen Angels (2016), showcase songs once performed by and oft-associated with Sinatra. The third album, aptly named Triplicate (2017), displays a more wide-ranging interest in the tradition, featuring thirty songs across a trio of discs. As with Christmas in the Heart, there was some public bewilderment as to why Dylan would return to the “musical world . . . [that] rock ‘n’ roll was born to abolish.”[16] But Dylan had been interested in such projects for decades: “Ever since Willie Nelson’s album Stardust, released in 1978, Bob Dylan had the idea of making an album of ten romantic pop standards that had been recorded and sung by Frank Sinatra.”[17]
Moreover, in November 1995, Dylan was a guest performer at a televised concert held in honor of Sinatra’s eightieth birthday. He played “Restless Farewell,” the final track on The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1963). On the surface, it seems an odd choice: “Restless Farewell” stems from Dylan’s early folk period, and he rarely performed it live.[18] Yet the song’s final stanza, now delivered in the voice of a weathered icon rather than an immaculate newcomer, intimates both admiration and identification: “So I’ll make my stand / And remain as I am / And bid farewell and not give a damn.” In selecting this song, Dylan may have been gesturing toward its uncanny resemblance to Sinatra’s 1969 hit “My Way.” Still, Dylan’s appreciation of Sinatra was not a late-career discovery. As he recalls in Chronicles, he had always had an affinity for the Great American Songbook, including classics such as “Ol’ Man River” and “Stardust,” both written in 1927.[19] And as for Sinatra in particular, Dylan adds, “I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything.”[20]
Of course, “death, God and the universe” is a fitting précis of Dylan’s own lyrical interests, which have remained true to form during the latter part of his career. While metaphysical and mystical themes are consonant with Dylan’s mining of traditional American music,[21] it is illuminating that, prior to the release of Tempest, he confessed an ongoing desire to focus on “specifically religious songs.”[22] A collection of such music has yet to materialize, but, according to some commentators, this aspiration has been implicit in much of Dylan’s output from Time Out of Mind to Tempest:
Many of Dylan’s albums recently have had the theme of God’s judgment and the apocalypse and the possibility of salvation. . . . Dylan has jibed at us for being surprised about this: “I was sitting in church / on an old wooden chair / I know nobody would look for me there” (“Marchin’ to the City,” Tell Tale Signs). But he is preoccupied with the apocalypse, religion and God, no matter how we might see the world.[23]
Dylan himself has remained coy about such concerns, though he has left no doubt as to the abiding influence of faith on his work. “[It is] all instilled in me. I wouldn’t know to get rid of it,” he told Jann Wenner in 2007.
In short, Dylan’s later career can be seen as a movement ad fontes, in which he returned to his musical roots in blues, folk, gospel, and jazz. Moreover, in the process, he authored new songs of rich lyrical texture, interweaving themes of judgment, love, mortality, and spirituality, all with an eye to the mysteries of divine revelation.[24] Perhaps no song better sums up this approach than “Highlands,” the sixteen-minute opus that concludes Time Out of Mind. Drawing on a guitar riff from Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton, and taking lyrical inspiration from Scottish poet Robert Burns, “Highlands” meanders through many of Dylan’s most personal concerns—the thoughtless squandering of youth, the steely resignation of old age, the evanescent comedy of quotidian life. And yet, despite it all, the song’s refrain suggests that Dylan’s hope remains focused on a distant country, far removed from earthly care and sorrow:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time.
Here, as ever, Dylan returns to the transcendent, as if it were beckoning his creativity from beyond—the lodestar of a life’s calling.
Making Sense of Dylan’s Religious Interests: A Kierkegaardian Approach
To this point it has been demonstrated (i) that religious sources and themes can be detected throughout Dylan’s corpus and (ii) that this religious component is so central that one cannot rightly come to grips with Dylan’s work without taking it into account. In and of themselves, these are not groundbreaking theses. That is to say, even if casual fans continue to view Dylan as a figurehead of 1960s counterculture, and even if secular-minded critics prefer to dismiss or ignore Dylan’s religious interests, it is nevertheless the case that many commentators have called attention to this aspect of his life and career.
A number of studies, for instance, have examined Dylan’s appropriation of Scripture. In 1985, Bert Cartwright issued The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan—a brief but meticulous study, which remains an important point of entry into the topic.[25] Recently, Michael Gilmour has expanded on Cartwright’s efforts, penning a pair of books that address Dylan’s explicit and implicit use of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.[26] Others have chosen to concentrate on how Dylan personifies the habits and practices of a particular religious tradition. Seth Rogovoy treats Dylan as a kind of badkhn, a Jewish folk artist who entertains with jokes, riddles, and tales.[27] In contrast, Scott Marshall submits that Dylan is best understood as a committed (if somewhat unorthodox) evangelical Christian.[28] Francis Beckwith, meanwhile, presents Dylan as a proponent of Aristotelian-cum-Catholic notions of natural law and virtue ethics.[29] All make good cases, but none can claim the final word. For Dylan draws “on multiple religious traditions and attitudes” and colors them with his “marvelously syncretistic imagination.”[30]
If, then, it is impracticable to locate Dylan in a specific religious tradition or to reduce the meaning of his art to a single theological Weltanschauung, would it be possible to find a vantage point from which to make sense of his religious interests? Two such inquiries immediately come to mind. The first is Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003), which groups Dylan’s songs into three overarching categories: (i) “The Sins” (ii) “The Virtues” and (iii) “The Heavenly Graces.” A knighted literary critic, not to mention an avowed atheist,[31] Ricks is less interested in Dylan’s theology than in finding “the right way to take hold of the bundle.”[32] For Ricks, in other words, theological concepts provide an organizational scaffolding whereby Dylan’s art, especially his lyrical virtuosity, can be analyzed. As he puts it, “The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody’s world—but Dylan’s in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing.”[33] Ricks scrutinizes dozens of Dylan tracks, even obscurities such as “Precious Angel” and “Handy Dandy.” The upshot is that Dylan emerges as one of the titans of Western letters—a figure whom Ricks compares to poets such as John Milton and T.S. Eliot.
Less ambitious, but more accessible, than Ricks’ tome is Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America (2010). Wilentz is a longtime professor of American History at Princeton, and so it is not surprising that he views Dylan against the backdrop of American culture. Wilentz’s Dylan is a “masked, shape-changing American alchemist,” whose true genius lies in “absorbing, transmuting, and renewing and improving American art forms long thought to be trapped in formal conventions.”[34] It is in this connection that Wilentz touches on Dylan’s interest in religion. The centrality of religion to the American story means that Dylan’s art, too, is unavoidably religious. Here Wilentz is not just referring to Dylan’s gospel period. In fact, the gospel period itself, rooted in “the Deep South, the South of black gospel and rhythm and blues,”[35] is seen as confirmation of Wilentz’s larger thesis.
The same is true of Dylan’s affinity for folk music. When Dylan covers a traditional song such as “Lone Pilgrim,” as he did on World Gone Wrong, he is tapping into the theology of American Christianity. “Lone Pilgrim” is among the songs collected in The Southern Harmony, and Musical Companion (1835) and The Sacred Harp (1844), popular early American hymnbooks.[36] For Wilentz, then, it is a mistake to view Dylan as a private, entrepreneurial songsmith. His art belongs to a line of succession, stretching, in the case of “Lone Pilgrim,” to long-forgotten Americans such as Brother John Ellis and Joseph Thomas—itinerant nineteenth-century preachers, who respectively were the author and the subject of “Lone Pilgrim.”[37]
In Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, I aim to synthesize and to deepen the respective approaches of Ricks and Wilentz. The former hardly explores the theoretical background of concepts such as “sin” and “virtue”; the latter effectively treats Dylan’s attentiveness to religion as an inheritance of American folk traditions. More can and should be done. This study will expand on Ricks’ schema by showing that religion lies at the heart of Dylan’s oeuvre, not in monolithic or univocal fashion, but precisely in and through the equivocity highlighted by Wilentz. As an American folk artist, Dylan does indeed absorb a plurality of interests and life-views, albeit not as a matter of indifference. The centrality of religion to his life and art suggests that, even if he respects the integrity of each existential perspective, he nevertheless orders them in terms of spiritual depth and meaning, from the alluring volatility of sensuous desire to timeless questions about the good life, culminating in the quest for God.
The great Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) will help flesh out this point. One of the focal points of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre is the nature and the purpose of the self. As he sees it, the human being is a synthesis of dialectical elements—infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, eternality and temporality. Each person relates to these elements based on the existential “sphere” to which she belongs. Kierkegaard theorizes that there are three such spheres, which he tends to situate in ascending order: the aesthetic involves a preference for immediate experience (construed in various ways); the ethical has to do with achieving a sense of personal identity by way of living for enduring commitments and values; the religious initially concerns the immanent human quest for eternal life but, according to Kierkegaard, ultimately comes to rest in God’s transcendent self-revelation in Jesus Christ.
My contention is that Kierkegaard’s theory of existential spheres gives us an illuminating way of approaching Dylan’s art. If, as Ricks observes, the interpreter of Dylan is faced with the question of how “to take hold of the bundle,” Kierkegaard’s thought can help us do precisely that. Just as Kierkegaard’s existential spheres “provide a kind of conceptual ‘map’ of the possibilities that confront a human exister,”[38] so do Dylan’s songs explore the same possibilities. That is not to say that Dylan consciously applied Kierkegaard’s theory to his songwriting or that Dylan should be considered a “Kierkegaardian.” Rather, it is to say that the complex nature of Dylan’s work can be illuminated by Kierkegaard’s existentialist anthropology. The latter offers a hermeneutical key that can unlock the former.
A trio of examples manifests the larger argument. In his signature song “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), Dylan sketches an alluring but desperate figured called “Miss Lonely,” whose life of sensual dissipation has fated her to wander aimlessly—an example of a form of despair that Kierkegaard associates with aesthetic existence. In “Sign on the Window,” the eighth track on Dylan’s underrated 1970 album New Morning, Dylan extols the “simple pleasures” of a life devoted to family: “Marry me a wife, catch a rainbow trout / Have a bunch of kids who call me ‘Pa’ / That must be what it’s all about.” Hence, in a way that recalls Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William, Dylan taps into the domestic-cum-civic bonds that are capable of providing a determinate, if also immanent, existential purpose. Third, and finally, Dylan’s 1981 song “Every Grain of Sand” stands as a poignant expression of religious faith—a testimony to God’s abiding presence amid the vicissitudes of life and, for that reason, a necessary precondition to what Kierkegaard defines as Christian faith proper. Dylan may not be an avid reader of Kierkegaard, but his art conveys a quintessentially Kierkegaardian theme—that life has different spheres and/or stages, culminating in the religious quest for eternal happiness.
Still, one might wonder, does any of this matter in an age shaped by science and technology? Is it not just a matter of time before someone in Silicon Valley develops a personalized algorithm for human fulfillment? Doubtless someone is trying. In the meantime, Dylan’s art, no less than Kierkegaard’s philosophy, serves to rekindle questions about the meaning of existence. After all, as German thinker Martin Heidegger famously put it, modern society stands threatened by a calculating technological Weltanschauung.[39] It is imperative, then, that people attend to poets, who reawaken our sense of appreciation and wonder at what it means to dwell on the earth. My contention is that Dylan is just such a poet.
[1] Jeff Slate, “Bob Dylan on Music’s Golden Era vs Streaming: ‘Everything’s Too Easy’,” The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2022.
[2] Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New York: Simon & Schuster), 500.
[3] Joseph Hudak, “Bob Dylan Whiskey Distillery, Center for the Arts to Open in Nashville in 2020,” Rolling Stone, April 9, 2019.
[4] Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michael Guesdon, Bob Dylan: All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2015), 526, 538.
[5] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 148.
[6] Ibid., 152.
[7] Ibid., 154.
[8] Ibid., 157-61.
[9] Margotin and Guesdon, Dylan: All the Songs, 588.
[10] Ibid., 614, 632.
[11] Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 321. Nevertheless, I agree with Wilentz that comparisons to the Lives of the Poets is “a little too high-minded” (ibid.).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 322.
[14] Ibid., 332.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: Updated and Revised Edition (New York: Continuum, 2008), 624.
[17] Margotin and Guesdon, Dylan: All the Songs, 693.
[18] Gray, Dylan Encyclopedia, 624.
[19] Dylan, Chronicles, 80-81.
[20] Ibid., 81.
[21] In 2007, Dylan was asked about the use of “religious imagery” in his songs. He replied, “That kind of imagery is just as natural to me as breathing, because the world of folk songs has enveloped me for so long. . . . It doesn’t come from the radio or TV or computers or any of that stuff. It’s embedded in the folk music of the English language” (Cott, ed., The Essential Interviews, 488).
[22] Quoted in Scott M. Marshall, Dylan: A Spiritual Life (Washington, D.C.: BP Books, 2017), 218.
[23] Quoted in ibid. The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 (2008) is a compilation album, gathering alternate versions, demos, live cuts, and outtakes from a variety of late-period contexts. “Marchin’ to the City” is a previously unreleased track from the Time Out of Mind sessions.
[24] Cott, ed., The Essential Interviews, 489.
[25] Bert Cartwright, The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (Lancashire: Wanted Man, 1985). Cartwright issued a revised edition in 1992.
[26] Michael J. Gilmour, Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture (New York: Continuum, 2004) and The Gospel According to Bob Dylan: The Old, Old Story for Modern Times (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
[27] Seth Rogovoy, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (New York: Scribner, 2009), 1-4.
[28] Marshall, Dylan: A Spiritual Life, 254: “When Bob Dylan penned [the gospel song] ‘Saving Grace’ in 1979, he plainly wrote that after the death of life comes the resurrection—and wherever he is welcome is where he will be. Why bet against Dylan having a place at that heavenly welcome table? He’s been hungry as a horse for a good long while.”
[29] Francis J. Beckwith, “Busy Being Born Again: Bob Dylan’s Christian Philosophy,” in Bob Dylan and Philosophy: It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Thinking), ed. Peter Vernezze and Carl J. Porter (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 145-55.
[30] Clifton R. Spargo and Anne K. Ream, “Bob Dylan and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, ed. Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88.
[31] Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2003), 378-79.
[32] Ibid., 6.
[33] Ibid., 2.
[34] Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 334-35.
[35] Ibid., 181.
[36] Ibid., 245.
[37] Ibid., 246-53.
[38] C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69.
[39] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper Perennial, 1966), 45.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay expands greatly on the latter part of the introduction to Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, Fortress Academic (2022), All Rights Reserved.
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