In the 1990s, Jakob Dylan (Bob’s son) rose to fame and popularity thanks to his band, the Wallflowers. With a raspy voice, penchant for poeticism and a lineage in music, Dylan was both a celebrity and something of a curiosity. What would Bob Dylan’s son sound like?
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Well, turns out he’s a terrific songwriter and singer, and an equally adept thinker. Today, the 54-year-old New York City-born artist is continuing to tour and in 2021, The Wallflowers put out their latest album, Exit Wounds, their first since 2012.
But given the Grammy Award-winning Dylan’s style and skill, as well as his famous roots, some might wonder what the musician has to say about the world outside of his songs. Here below, we will dive into the best 20 Jakob Dylan quotes.
[RELATED: 3 Songs You Didn’t Know Jakob Dylan Wrote Outside The Wallflowers, Solo]
1. “To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.”
2. “It’s a little gross to put yourself in every song. I mean, how interesting do people really think you are?”
3. “If people want to talk about Bob Dylan, I can talk about that. But my dad belongs to me and four other people exclusively. I’m very protective of that. And telling people whether he was affectionate is telling people a lot. It has so little to do with me. I come up against a wall.”
4. “I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively—and there were a lot of choices—writing songs was king.”
5. “Songs are not better just because they’re emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.”
6. “My songs have always had hope and perseverance in them—I never write songs that have no escape hatch, no positivity.”
7. “Some people just can’t get over their own hang-ups to listen to my music.”
8. “I don’t feel like I chose to do music as much as I made a decision to not stop doing music.”
9. “If all you were left believing was what you were seeing, it’d be nothing but desperate. To have hope, you’re going to have to imagine that there’s something behind the curtain.”
10. “There’s only so many things to sing about, so what’s going to make a song appeal to you more than someone else’s is just a unique way of saying the same thing.”
11. “The back story of a songwriter isn’t important to me—I don’t listen to music needing to know who the guy is.”
12. “Those things interest me a lot in songwriting—the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.”
13. “I liked getting the Grammy more than not getting it.”
14. “I’ve got a life that really matters to me, and that’s because of the way I was raised. My ethics are high because my parents did a great job.”
15. “I got to watch my heroes meet him and saw how they reacted, whether it was Joe Strummer or Tom Waits. It was peculiar. I’m so stoked to meet Tom Waits, and he’s so nervous to meet my dad. It’s a head spin.”
16. “You have to have a work ethic, and you have to be educated in what you’re doing. You have to take it seriously. It doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be serious. But you’ve got to have the tools.”
17. “I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don’t over-intellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it’s something you do if you put the work in.”
18. “We’ve all had that experience where we hear a song that we’ve liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it’s about, and you’re often disappointed.”
19. “I’m not somebody who carries around a notepad and writes songs all day long. I don’t imagine everything I think of is worth being in a song. So I tend to collect notes, and I set time aside to go to work and write songs.”
20. “Every song you write you think is the last one you’re going to manage. You put everything you’ve got into the song, and you’ve twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.”
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images
