“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” – Bob Dylan On this day, back in 1962 the world received a humble new album from a young scruffy starlet they called the original vagabond in Greenwich Village. Whisperings in the dust-covered folk basements about his Promethean potential may not have been realised, but whether the world knew it yet or not, the cat was out of the bag now and the greatest songwriter of all time was dawning. For six decades now, Bob Dylan has presided over the cultural landscape of music like a rambling Greenwich Village spawned numen, wayfaring a serpentine path through divine creative pastures and leaving a breadcrumb trail that has shaped the world in his wake. From his paid gig at Gerde’s Folk City where a sign was mocked up calling him the “Son of Jack Elliott”, all the way up to ‘Murder Most Foul’ which Nick Cave described as sounding as though “it has travelled a great distance, through stretches of time, full of an earned integrity and stature that soothes in the way of a lullaby, a chant, or a prayer,” Dylan his simultaneously been a timeless connection to the past while illuminating the future. With this profound sense of freedom to freely muse and snatch a semblance of beauty and understanding from anywhere and everywhere, he has inspired generations of songwriters, and as Dylan said himself what can be greater than that: “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?” This notion has been ratified by near enough every artist to follow in the path of his enrapturing introspection, from Paul McCartney who said that when he met him, “I could feel myself climbing a […]

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