Credit: Joe Bielawa
Regarding the greatest artists of all time, lyrical importance tends to be 50/50. Although many have tried to become the next rock and roll Shakespeare by making lines that will live on for eternity, there are people who write the lyrics at the last minute and let the audience make sense of what they’re trying to say, whether that’s the gibberish that Kurt Cobain sang about or Michael Stipe’s incoherent ramblings.
While Rod Stewart was comfortable singing almost anything and making it work, he felt that this artist still had some of the greatest lyrics that he had ever heard.
In the tradition of blues that Stewart came from, no one had to necessarily be the most literate poet of all time or anything. Some of the best blues songs are based on a simple premise and everyone sitting on a guitar riff for as long as they can to get the right amount of swagger out of it, and listening to the chorus of ‘Stay With Me’, it’s safe to say that most of what Stewart was talking about had more to do with lust than anything heartfelt.
Looking at where he went on albums like Every Picture Tells a Story, though, he was far more interested in working in the singer-songwriter mould. There are parts of the album that seem indebted to what Carole King and James Taylor were doing around the same time, but that folksy approach to rock and roll was something that Bob Dylan helped invent without even realising it.
Even though Dylan was still a folkie when he got started, he always had a particular fascination with rock and roll. While most people thought of the genre as something that was corrupting real music and would bring down popular music to a lower level, Dylan saw it as another medium to get his message across to as many people as he could.
Credit: Vestron Pictures
Despite artists like The Beatles admiring Dylan from afar when he was making tunes like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, hearing something like Bringing It All Back Home was one of the defining moments for anyone who loved folk-rock. Dylan was still making music for the masses, but by using the electric guitar as his weapon of choice, he was proving that he could pull off rock and roll much better than his copycats like The Byrds ever could.
Although Stewart was still indebted to the blues greats that came before him, hearing Dylan shake people up with his words on ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ struck a deep chord in him, saying, “I love Bob Dylan. I think he is the all-time great lyricist. Not enough can be said about Bob.” However, maybe the biggest strength about Dylan is how little we still know about the ins and outs of writing those classics.
Further reading: From The Vault
While it’s impossible to get inside the man’s head, hearing a song like ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was revolutionary, considering the position he was in. He had been known as one of the leading figures in folk music, and in six minutes of a rock song, he seemed to be leaving his past behind and letting every member of his audience know that they were living in a much different world now that rock and roll was taking over.
Part of what made Dylan so important to Stewart was the fact that his lyrics never sounded polished in the traditional sense. There was a looseness to them, almost as if he were pulling thoughts directly out of the air and setting them against whatever music happened to be underneath.
That approach gave songs like ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ a sense of danger because they didn’t behave like standard pop tunes. Dylan wasn’t interested in neat resolutions or tidy choruses. He wanted his words to tumble forward with the same unpredictability as real conversation.
That influence can still be heard throughout Stewart’s best work. Even when his music leaned toward radio-friendly rock and roll, there was usually a conversational quality to his delivery that separated him from many of his contemporaries. Songs like ‘Mandolin Wind’ and ‘Reason to Believe’ feel lived-in rather than carefully constructed, which is part of what made Stewart such a compelling storyteller in his own right. He may never have chased Dylan’s surreal poetry, but he clearly understood the same principle that made Dylan revolutionary in the first place: the best lyrics are often the ones that sound human.
Despite Stewart never quite reaching the same level that Dylan had in the lyrical department, he didn’t really need to, either. When listening to tracks like ‘Maggie May’ or ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, everyone knew that this was a man who was willing to pay his respects to the artist who defined what it meant to write lyrics that stirred people up.
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