I finished the California bar exam two days ago...

...and that means EBDS will be returning. Promise. Read more!

Every Bob Dylan Song will return...

...soon.

Aren't I a tease?

Thank you all for your support and well wishes. A full explanation - and something both a bit special and a bit off the beaten track - is forthcoming. Stay tuned. Read more!

EBDS goes Hollywood...???

...no, not really.

As of this Thursday (or thereabouts), I will be making my way to sunny Los Angeles, CA. This means that updates may be spotty for a little while - hopefully not, but I'm not sure how Internet is going to work out for me my first week there. Any EBDS fans out there, feel free to shoot me an e-mail and let me know the cool places to go out there.

Or, if you'd like to help me move, that'd be great too. :p

Tony Ling Read more!

Quick "I'm not dead" update

Hello.

In case you were wondering, the site is not dead - events in my life just forced me to go on a longer hiatus than I wanted to. I'll be returning with new posts in February. On that, you have my word.

Tony Ling Read more!

Every Bob Dylan Song - the (re)introduction

Hello. Again.

My name is Tony Ling, and this is my blog, Every Bob Dylan Song. Thanks for reading it!

This blog is dedicated to looking at the creative work of Mr. Bob Dylan, song by song. It's projected finishing date is sometime around 2021. Hope you'll stick around for that!

So why a blog about covering the career of an artist who's released dozens of albums and hundreds of songs, and that's before you even get to his archived and live material? That's a good question. And I think I have some good answers.

First off, I enjoy writing, and don't do it nearly enough. Like any muscle in your body, I feel like your writing ability needs constant exercise, and this is a way to work it out as much as possible. And if I can't write about my favorite artist, who or what can I write about?

Secondly, as I'd just mentioned, Bob Dylan is my favorite artist of all time, in any medium. I listen to his music every day, have read books about him, seen movies about him, and have seen him live in concert. And I realize that I am far from the first person to attempt to pay tribute to him in some way, but this is really the only way I can think of how to do that. And maybe, in some miniscule way, I can contribute to the legend that is Bob Dylan; I'm certainly contributing to the libraries worth of commentary and analysis and what have you about the man and his music.

It's not that writing about him is THAT hard, if I'm going to be honest. Look, there are certain bands and musicians for whom the music is only part of the appeal, just like there are certain bands and musicians for whom the music is the ONLY part of the appeal, completely self-contained. This is obviously just opinion, but look at a band like Coldplay. What do you think of when you think of Coldplay? Sure, you might think of the fact that they sound a lot like Radiohead (a meme that's reached the point where Chris Martin has to publicly state that Radiohead "gave them (their) career", which might not be true but had to be said just to get vultures like me off their backs), or that Martin might be the luckiest man alive for who he gets to wake up with every morning. But the music, to me, has no appeal outside of the fact that it's music, occasionally well-performed and well-written, but just music. It doesn't find any higher planes of existence - and, for the record, doesn't have to. But a Coldplay song is, in the end, just a song. Nothing more.

Now, of course, it's entirely unfair to compare most any musician/band to Bob Dylan and the body of work he's created. But let's think about this for a second. Depending on when you think rock and roll (i.e., modern music) started, either 1951 with "Rocket 88" or 1955 with Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, it's only been in existence for five-plus decades. Dylan has been alive for that entire span, and an active musician for maybe a decade less. Imagine that! Imagine having your recording career span folk music, 60s pop, 70s rock, 80s, er, whatever it is, 90s music, and the 2000s. Imagine a man as intelligent as Dylan, as capable of writing about damn near anything as Dylan, and think about how many topics he could cover, how many walks of life he could go through, how many pieces of our existence on this planet he can collect and synthesize into his own music. Dylan wrote about himself, and he wrote about us. That tends to make things easier to write about.

As a final note, I'm just going to say that this is NOT going to be an outright analytical blog, nor will it be biographical. If you want to read a great biography about Dylan (as well as a level of curmudgeon-ism that defies belief), Clinton Heylin's will do just fine. If you want to get really in-depth on the songs and how they were recorded, Paul Williams is your man. I'll go to websites and do some research to make sure I'm not printing something egregiously wrong (and even then...), but for the most part, I'm doing this from the gut, the same way I play poker. I'm a mediocre poker player, but that's not the point. This blog might get personal at times, and if that bothers you, I understand completely. But that's the way Dylan has affected me. He is as intrinsically a part of my life as baseball, The Simpsons, and Hunter S. Thompson's books are. I cannot imagine my life without him, and it's difficult to remember what life was like before I'd heard of him. My blog will be written, and should be read, with that in mind.

All right, pep talk over. That's all from me for now. Thanks to everyone that reads this blog, thanks to Expecting Rain for linking me (I've read the site since college, and it's truly amazing), and thanks, of course, to our man Bob, for everything.

PS: The hardest thing in life is to read about something you have no interest in; Lord knows that if I'm forced to read about quantum physics or changing spark plugs my eyes cross and I lose my sense of time. With that in mind, if anybody reads this blog once and decides it's not for them, I will not have a problem with that. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #...oh, wait

Even though nobody's reading this blog right now, I still feel the need to post that I'm going to be on the road for a couple days and won't be updating until I get Internet access back (hopefully Wednesday, probably Thursday). I should've had an entry up today, but too much has been going on. I'm not abandoning this blog, not by any means - but starting next week, things might be a little different. We'll see how it goes.

At any rate, why not go to www.dylanchords.org and learn how to play some of the songs on Bob Dylan? You, too, might one day end up being a folk music phenomenon! Read more!

Every Bob Dylan Song? What?

Hello.

My name's Tony Ling, and this is my blog, Every Bob Dylan Song.

This blog will be dedicated to every David Bowie song. I think the blog title needs some work.

Okay, it's actually dedicated to every Bob Dylan song. That's right, I'm going to write about every Bob Dylan song ever recorded.* I'll be offering reviews, random thoughts, and maybe the occasional essay, covering everything from "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" to "Ain't Talkin'". There will be laughs, there will be tears, and there will be lots of misplaced punctuation and sentences with dashes in them. It'll be a hoot!**

*officially released - Bob's unofficial catalog rivals some major bands' official catalogs, so I think I'll be staying within the boundaries of reason.

**Disclaimer: may or may not be a hoot.

But this won't be the only content on EBDS - oh, no! I'll be writing longer-form pieces on other pieces of the Dylan puzzle - live albums, famous bootlegs, maybe even a book review here and there. I'll put up Youtube videos when there are good ones to be found, and mp3s when the awesome power of my words aren't enough to convey how awesome "Absolutely Sweet Marie" or something is. *** And I'll have the occasional guest writer to offer his/her thoughts, tell me how totally wrong/totally right I am about something, and (in the case of my pal and fellow Dylan worshipper Justin), totally outshine me in the writing department. In fact, Lord willing, Justin will be just as big a contributer to this site as I am, and therefore will get the chance to outshine me that much more. That bastard!****

***I'll stick to live mp3s as much as possible - no need to have the MPAA break down my door and smash my computer with a baseball bat.

****Sorry, Justin.

Why, you ask, am I taking on this monumental task? Excellent question. Uh...

Uh...

Look over there!

(runs)

(runs)

(comes running back, way out of breath)

Okay...okay...that was stupid. I actually ran away from my computer and out of my house, then came back to finish this blog post. But see - that's the dedication I have for this blog!

The real answer is that I'm about as big a Dylan fan as you can find, and have been for nearly a decade now. He's influenced the way I think about music, and considering how much I think about music, that's a REALLY big influence. And he's been the muse for what I consider some of my best writing about music (one of those pieces might find its way here when I feel like it - read: when I get lazy and decide to take a blog post off). This is, in as small and inconsequential a way as possible, my tribute to who I consider to be the greatest musician that ever lived.

Why have I decided to undertake this project at this point in my (currently turbulent) life? Well, there's actually an underlying current to the way I approach things, and it's this:

I suck at responsibility.

Not to get all dramatic or emo-ish on you, but I've known for a long time that the hardest thing for me to do is to stick with something. My hard drive is littered with unfinished screenplays, novels, short stories, and other writing-related detritus, constant reminders that the one semi-talent I believe I have is being seriously underutilized. I do write music reviews for an established website (www.treblezine.com - seriously, give them a look, there's some great shit on there), but that's an intermittent pursuit more than anything.

This blog, on the other hand, is not going to be intermittent. Once a week, I will be posting something here. And, let's face it - if I can't get myself worked up to write about my favorite entertainer ever, what CAN I get myself worked up for?

So let's see how this goes. Every Bob Dylan Song, as written about by me (and whoever I can scam into contributing). Enjoy! Read more!