If Bob Dylan tells us it's time for joy, we'd better pay attention

Joan Baez delivers a great line in Diamonds and Rust. It’s her song looking back on her relationship with Bob Dylan, released 10 years after he brought about a sudden and absolute split. He phones one night, out of the blue, from “a booth in the midwest”.  

That’s not the line. In truth, the whole thing is a masterclass in songwriting. Baez will be seen by many, forever really, as an adjunct to Dylan. That is not unexpected, as he is, you know, Bob Dylan. But it does overshadow her as a significant artist in her own right. In Diamonds And Rust, from the first moment of complete shock, an almost uncontrolled burst of “well I’ll be damned, here comes your ghost again”, we know it’s one of the great works of the American canon. 

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But the line I’m looking at is when she goes right back to the start. “You burst on the scene/Already a legend/The unwashed phenomenon.” It captures the sense that Dylan was complete immediately, that something had landed, as if from another planet, and things would never be the same. There are few American popular musicians of the 20th century who shifted the gravity around them so significantly – maybe only Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Little Richard or Elvis had something like that tectonic pressure.  

This is not news. That Dylan has retained such presence for more than 60 years is significant. That he remains largely unquantifiable explains why, when he pops up and makes a statement, it is a moment. It happened last week. Dylan sent a tweet. It said this: “Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.’ I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.” And that was enough to set the hares running.  

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Bob Dylan becoming active on Twitter as others say they’re leaving is a Dylan challenging wherever the tide goes sort of move. His first tweet – beyond an outlier mourning Little Richard – that seemed to be him, rather than his team, only popped up in September. Maybe, as some fans have said, he’ll prove to be a magnet for those who had declared they were moving to Bluesky, or someplace else. 

That it should be Nick Cave he went to see and is now discussing as a lyricist of genuine might anoints Cave. He’s doing OK without that, is Cave. He’s been around and he knows his way around a tune. And his new album Wild God, from which Joy is lifted, is one of the records of the year. But still. 

The real significance is in what Dylan says. Now is the time for joy. Dylan has not commented on the state we’re in, either straight or obliquely, for some time. His last political message in song was Murder Most Foul, a long look over the assassination of Kennedy, and the death of the American dream but also about how music and art can be a redeeming force. It was released just as Covid was gripping, and while Trump was still in the White House.  

And now, the ageing Dylan is going much more simple and straightforward. 

There’s a late Seamus Heaney poem called Album that I like a great deal. It’s about memory, where it takes us, about family, parents, and ultimately about allowing unvarnished joy to hammer in. For a few lines famous Seamus deals with the difficulty of expressing emotion to his late father. He tried to find the right moment and it always passed. It was a grandchild, he said, who unencumbered by the scaffold and fears and cynicism and blocks we grow to stop us acting in the moment, launched a big hug towards his grandfather and brought pleasure to the old man leaving him “vulnerable to delight”. That is a wonderful line. 

We do not have to look far, in private or in public life, to find moments that could lead to sorrow, or where sorrow has washed in. And this is not an attempt to diminish or gloss over the reality of hardships as they present in the actuality of day to day. This is Big Issue. We understand how things are. But like old Bob says, there is enough of the darkness. It’s OK to allow for joy. That’s about right. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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