A few years ago I posted my essay “The Sound of Bob Dylan – Poetry for your Ear”, starting like this: “It has always been the case, for me, that it is the sound of Bob Dylan that forms the basis of my passionate relationship with the artist.” I always knew that, from the beginning, that it was the vocals that really dug the deepest in my heart. That doesn’t really mean that I have the language to explain this unspeakable mystery. Still, my favorite writers about Dylan includes the ones that acknowledges and sheds light on this part of his art, whether they used an academic language or the language of a journalist, music critic or just passionate fandom. Paul Williams was easily one of them, highlighting the unique versions of the songs, as much as of the songs itself. Betsy Bowden, with her “Performed Literature” focused on the development of songs in live performances. Another favorite became Steven Rings, associate professor from the University of Chicago, first when I read his great essay “A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 1964–2009″, impressed by his acamdemic ability to describe the multitudes of variations that I already knew, loved and had listened to through the years, in a way that I, not a musicician or musicologist, could understand and relate to. What a joy! Of course, when advertising for this new book started, I couldn’t wait to get my copy. I stood in line!

We all know the difficulties when it comes to write about music, without at the same time presenting the sound of music. To write about a concert in a way that makes the reader feel he was there might be a goal for some of us, but mostly we all fall short in trying. When you write a book like “What Do You Hear?” the same problem is obvious. Steven Rings found a solution for this, adding a well of sound examples on his own website, soundingbobdylan.com, a perfect companion to the reading of this book, the examples often answering the question of “what do Steven really mean by this?” A QR code follows each chapter, with the examples used in that specific chapter. Both fun and enlightening.

The book might interest the most sophisticated readers of music, as well as the musicologists familiar with all kinds of musical terminology, but the good news is that even people, like me, that can’t read music, that don’t have the full overview of all the musical definitions and nomenclature, still can find their way through this unique story of spontaneity, “improvised” or planned variations, the search for something new, something fresh in the delivery, a twist in the spur of the moment, the will to not sing the song in the same way twice – for some listeners, the reason that they don’t like Dylan, or they don’t like the live Dylan – for others, like me, it’s an, and maybe the most important, explanation of the urge to see or listen to another show, or five.

Rings speaks about Dylan’s “sonic imperfections” as part of the magic we are talking about. Quite fitting for an artist that one time wrote «I have given up at making any attempt at perfection». Rings quotes musicologist Lee Marshall: “Where are the works from musicology, from performance studies, or from drama that could help us develop a critical vocabulary appropriate for (Dylan’s music and performances)?”, and that Marshall calls for studies that explore the ways in which his performances “generate their affects aesthetically, through music, performance, and voice, and not just words.” I would claim that this book is, not the only, but one of the richest answers to Marshall’s prayers I’ve ever read.

In an interview in 1984, Dylan was, among other themes, speaking about his own peculiar way of timing and phrasing in a way that springs to mind, reading this book:

“When I do whatever it is that I’m doing, there’s rhythm involved and there’s phrasing involved. And that’s where it all balances out: in the rhythm of it and in the phrasing of it.

It’s not in the lyrics. People think it’s in the lyrics. Maybe on the records it’s in the lyrics, but in a live show it’s not all in the lyrics, it’s in the phrasing and the dynamics and the rhythm. It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrics.”

Steven Rings elaborates on those ingredients in Dylan’s work in a way that combines the passion and love for Dylan as a singer with an academic approach that opens up in a way that invites us into the depth of the book. But it is a tough challenge he’s taken on, and he knows it: “What can we say with certainty about Dylan’s voice, in all of its teeming multiplicity, its wild signifying energy, its sheer muchness?” As it turns out – quite a lot! The author takes us through the long road of many mouths and many voices, with a hand-picked arsenal of sound examples that links the words and the experience of listening in a very elegant way. Always with the main focus on performance, Rings entwines the story of the artist, the story about his inspirations, aspirations, and the long road the artist has taken.

An example of how Dylan almost embodies a song cames when Rings writes about one of my favorite tracks, and my favorite version, by any artist, of “This Land Is Your Land” from Carnegie Hall in November1961: “…..the young Dylan’s strategically aged voice sounds vaguely rural, southern, poor, and white – all thing that Guthrie in fact was – but the result sounds very little like Guthrie. Dylan’s voice instead seems to index a kind of archetype, that of a wise southern bard, the voice even more worn by hard travelin’ than Guthrie’s was.” Exactly. And later: “Dylan never sounds like his vocal models. For all of his evident gifts at imitation and mimicry, his voice remains stubbornly singular. And that singularity is paradoxically heightened through imitation. This is the vocal identity: as his voice engages others’, the particularity of his own vocal instrument emerges with ever more clarity.

Rings doesn’t limit his work to Dylan’s most famous weapon of choice, his voice (Part I of the book), but also digs deep into both the reception and possible readings or understanding of Dylan as a musician (Part II of the book). Even if the vocals are the part that always was my main focus, Rings writings about Dylan as a guitar player, harmonica player and pianist, makes perfect sense as a part of the same story, and I’m especially impressed by the great chapter about the harmonica’s role, place and play in the book. It underlines my feeling about the harmonica as, not always, but sometimes, the most naked part of Dylan’s performance. For me the night in Molde 1996, with Dylan literally on his knees at the stage, playing his heart and harmonica out on “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, springs to mind, as does his fabulous harmonica solo at the end of “Mr Tambourine Man” in Leicester, 1966. Among many astounding harmonica solos through the years. Rings delves into the story of the instrument, the techniques and possibilities inside it, and to which effect Dylan uses it in different songs, in different parts of his history of performing. The role it plays, the sound it makes, the place it takes, the feeling or the sound it emulates. Great stuff.

The chapter devoted to the piano is also of great interest, as it was Dylan’s first instrument, and, these days, the most central instrument in his live performances, though with the harmonica at hand. Strings summarizes it’s important place for Dylan like this: “Most important for our story, the instrument allowed Dylan to both escape from, and return to, his childhood roots. Think of it as a kind of musical express train, taking him to points distant as well as back home.” Rings takes us back to 1957 and young Robert Zimmerman’s performance at “Hibbing High”, and ends his lesson of Dylan’s piano in Roskilde, 2019, with his beautiful rendition of “Girl From The North Country”.

Part III of the book is called “Sounding Hard Rain”. In an in-depth book about what we can hear when we listen to Bob Dylan, this might be the in-depthest part of it all. It could been a book by itself – deep-diving in all things “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall”, the whole story of the song, the background, inspirations, the performances from the first to the last, from 1962 to 2024, statistics, the arrangements, the musical development and changes, the vocal development and changes. Many of us will agree with Rings that the fabulous performance of the song in Nara, 1994, is one of the greatest versions of the song ever, maybe one of Dylan’s greatest performances period. Rings is understandably speaking of it as milestone, there is a before Nara and there is an after Nara. (I have to say I miss Rings take on my own special favorite of the song – the version from Holmdel, August 2003, a version I often goes back to as a definitive example of how Dylan works inside one particular performance. I even tried to describe on my blog what I did hear in my highly amateurish way, far from the academic approach where Steven Rings is a master. If you’re interested, you’ll find my piece here.)

As in the rest of the book there in Part III will be parts so deep into the musicology that I just have to scroll on a page or two, but that’s the beauty of it, I’ll soon be on dry land again, and find stuff that speaks directly to me and my level of competence. Rings writes for all of us, and he knows it. Don’t be afraid.

The book ends with an afterword dwelling on the theme “On Perfection”, starting with a quote from Dylan, answering a question about improvisation in his music. He defines what he does to not be improvisation, arguing quite the opposite: “…the idea is to stay consistent… You basically play the same thing time after time in the most perfect way you can.” He acknowledges the possibility to change patterns and structural lines, “but that’s not improvisation”. In the most humble way Rings discuss this quote up against the theme of the book and his deep studies of the large amount of variation in Dylan’s performances. The short answer is accepting that Dylan distances his own variations from improvisation as we know it from improvisation as a key ingredient of jazz. Rings explains why this is an understandable position: “As we have heard time and again, his singing and playing are instead closer to a kind of a kind of strategic primitivism, untutored and raw. Dylan invents incessantly on stage, yes, but he does not improvise like Charlie Parker.” That’s true. Steven Rings true. Obviously Dylan through his career doesn’t always sing his songs the same way each night, neither in concert nor the same way twice in studio. If there is a consistence in his work – as in “the idea is to stay consistent”, it has to be another kind of consistency than endless repetitions. The “most perfect way” to deliver a song may change from night to night, from year to year, and might maybe be a description of the consistency of it all, the never ending search for the “perfect way” to perform the song, this night, this time in life, more than of perfection itself.

As a reader and listener you might of course not hear (or like) the same as Steven Rings, (or as me) but “What Do You Hear?” most of all invites you to listen – maybe one more time, or even maybe in a new way the next time you are listening to Dylan. If that’s true, that might be exactly the kind of inspiration the author want with this book. If you are spellbound by Dylan’s voice, this is the book for you, as it was for me. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”.

Johnny Borgan