It's a little gross to put yourself in every song. I mean, how interesting do people really think you are?
From Jakob Dylan
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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