When he was first learning to play guitar at 14 or 15, Dave Stewart dived into the Delta blues, and the likes of Robert Johnson, and the British invasions flooding the radio—the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who—before becoming transfixed by The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan. After discovering Bob Dylan, from the albums his college-bound brother left behind, Stewart was determined to play local folk clubs in his hometown of Sunderland, England, but was rejected for his adolescent appearance.
“I looked about 12,” says Stewart, “so they wouldn’t let me in the door.” Eventually, Mike Elliott, who ran the George and Dragon, a folk hub in the area during the early 1960s, took pity on the young Stewart strumming his guitar on the streets and let him in for a two-song set.
Inside the smoke-filled pub in the upstairs room was “like stepping into a sacred room where visionaries and rebels converged,” says Stewart. Local folk musicians mostly performed songs hanging on to stories of the coal mines and shipyards, so the older patrons were shocked to see a young kid step on stage, belting out Dylan’s lyrics.
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During his two-song set, Stewart remembers performing Dylan’s “To Ramona,” an experience that left him with a lasting musical connection to Dylan. From there, he began singing and playing Dylan wherever he could.
“I’ve always had this ongoing passion for his songwriting,” says Stewart. “He was always musically and lyrically mind-blowing. I love words, and I love the way that they tumble out of Dylan’s mouth, and in his phrasing, where the rhyming scheme is skewed sometimes.”
He adds, “When you read them [the lyrics], you may think, ‘Oh, that’s strange,’ because one of his classic things is that there’s no chorus. There’s just a tagline at the end like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ or ‘Simple Twist of Faith.’”
Sixty years after his first introduction, Stewart revisited some of Dylan’s songs that had followed him since his early teens on Dave Does Dylan.
[RELATED: Dave Stewart Cracks the ‘Voodoo’ Behind the Music of ‘Ebony McQueen’]
Recorded in hotels and studios in and out of the Eurythmics Songbook Tour in 2024, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the duo’s breakthrough album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Stewart started posting his Dylan covers on Instagram, which were compiled as they were recorded in the moment for the album with no additional production treatment.
“I was just playing how I played them when I was younger, in folk clubs or my flat,” says Stewart. “A lot of the time I wasn’t playing the right chords or the same chords [as Dylan], and I was just singing them in my natural voice, which doesn’t sound like Dylan, and that’s how I used to always do it on my own with nobody there. It’s very comforting to sing Dylan songs.”
Dave Does Dylan follows everything from Stewart’s formative Dylan years with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” off The Freewheelin and Another Side classics “To Ramona” and “Spanish Harlem Incident” to Bringing It All Back Home with “She Belongs to Me,” the Nashville Skyline-era “Lay, Lady Lay,” and Blonde on Blonde tracks “I Want You” and the closing “Visions of Johanna.”
Earlier in his career, Stewart also started collaborating with Dylan, from their first connection in 1985, which ended with the two talking late into the night at a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles to walking around Camden High Street in London nearly a deacade later with two 8mm cameras, filming and directing Dylan’s 1993 video for “Blood in My Eyes.”
In 1986, Stewart also played guitar on Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded and joined him on stage throughout the years, and the two became friends in the process. “I find conversations with him, whether on the phone or when we’re together, really relaxed and easy,” shared Stewart in a previous statement. “As you can imagine, he is full of great observations and wisdom, all wrapped up in a poetic language.”
For Stewart, some of the earlier Dylan songs resonate differently now, like “Spanish Harlem Incident” from 1964, and remembering a gyspy girl in his life. “I would pick up a guitar and go, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that one gypsy girl,’” shares Stewart.
“That happens as you get older, in the middle of your life’s journey, when you’re thinking about when you were 18,” he adds. “And then, as you get older, certain things come into your head, or reflections, memories, and you remember in spaces, incidents, where you were living, and you go ‘Oh yeah, we used to play this song all the time.’”
Moving into the ’70s, Stewart also taps the Planet Waves track “Forever Young” opening “Simple Twist of Fate” from Blood on the Tracks to “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” written for the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Dylan starred in alongside James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson.
On the album, Stewart also explores Dylan’s experimental era during the 1980s and early ’90s with “Emotionally Yours” through what was considered a return to form, Time Out of Mind, and the hit “Make You Feel My Love.”
“When you’re in a band, whether you’re in the Rolling Stones or whatever band you started off in, you have a sound, and the audience expects it,” says Stewart. “Even Annie [Lennox] and I changed our sound completely from 1982 to 1990 with Eurythmics.”
Dylan is just one of Stewart’s musical stops now, following the release of his 2022 autobiographical album Ebony McQueen, 26 songs sketching his coming-of-age years in Sunderland, which is now being turned into a film, and his 2023 jazz album Cloud Walking, which he co-produced with pianist Hannah Koppenburg.
In 2023, Stewart also collaborated with Joss Stone on the original music for the musical The Time Traveller’s Wife, based on the 2003 Audrey Niffenegger book and film from 2009, and launched The Time Experience Project, releasing the rock opera Who to Love: Time is a Masterpiece in collaboration with the Italian band Mokdelic and actress Greta Scarano.
If time allows, Stewart may explore more Dylan songs. “I’m so, so grateful for getting to know him personally and to now record this album of songs after years of singing them to friends and to myself,” said Stearrt. “It’s been a long road, and these lyrics and melodies have kept me company through the best and the worst of times. I hope my album can do the same for Dylan fans out there, who understand the mastery and the mystery Bob has bestowed on us, and still does to this day.”
Dave Does Dylan Tracklist:
Simple Twist Of Fate
I Want You
Emotionally Yours
Forever Young
To Ramona
Make You Feel My Love
Lay, Lady, Lay
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Spanish Harlem Incident
Shelter From The Storm
She Belongs To Me
Visions Of Johanna
Photo: Courtesy of Dave Stewart
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