In After the Flood, the biographer explores how Bob Dylan reinvented his musical style during the latter half of his career.
What prompted you to write this book?
In 1991, when Dylan received the Lifetime Grammy Achievement Award, he gave this astonishing speech in which he was clearly viewing his work as a kind of spiritual failing. It looked very much as if his creative life was over, but as it turns out, it was actually just starting over again. He went into a long, sustained process of reinventing himself, and in many ways started over his career the way that it had begun 30 years earlier.
In what ways did Dylan reinvent himself?
He was teaching himself how to think about music again. He was teaching himself how to sing again, and write again, and he did that through a new collage style of writing songs that drew not only on folk and rock sources but also on books, films, histories, and speeches. Once he started writing new songs with Time Out of Mind and Rough and Rowdy Ways, what I was struck by was how much those songs know. He didn’t write a song about the Civil War, for example, so much as write a song that embodied the Civil War and literalized it, through extraordinarily deft and judicious quotations from both sides of the conflict, whether it was Henry Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, or Walt Whitman or John Greenleaf Whittier or Herman Melville or Julia Ward Howe.
You characterize 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways as a guide to Dylan.
In a way, there were two frames for the book. The first is that 1991 Grammy speech. The second in some ways is Rough and Rowdy Ways, which I read as his real Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He gave an actual one, of course, but it seems to me Rough and Rowdy Ways is a response to winning the prize in his own forms, idioms, gestures, and styles. Virtually every song on that album has to do with the making of art. For instance, “My Own Version of You,” his retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about collage—about constructing art from shards of the past.
What were you most surprised to learn about Dylan?
I was most surprised by how hard he works. You look at these multiple drafts of songs, some of which are radically different from one to the next. And who else his age tours as much as he does? To go back where we started, when he got that Grammy award and identified where he was as a kind of spiritual failing, it’s almost as if he said, “I’ve got to really start working again. I have this gift and I’ve got to make use of it.” That was the biggest surprise to me, and I think it will surprise readers.
