I think it does help starting out in that folk tradition. It opens the playing field a little bit for others to do the same. “And because of the way that he’s reimagined his own songs over time, he hasn’t stuck to keeping those songs the same in a live format. “I think the way that he’s been a fabulous and entertaining shape-shifter for his entire career is very inspiring to a lot of artists,” she explains. (Not to mention the fact that, as Swift pointed out, he’s got a song that’ll suit just about every style of musician.) But according to Swift, ultimately what draws artists to cover Dylan over and over again is the fact that Dylan himself was so open to reinventing himself. Maybe it’s because the fact that his outstanding lyricism often gets lauded more than his distinct vocals and there’s less pressure to replicate his songs note for note, but there’s something about Dylan tracks that makes them inherently coverable. You can make a record of Bob Dylan covers - anybody could do it, Chrissie Hynde’s just done it - and no one would be the same because there’s just so much wonderful, beautiful and quite diverse and different material to pick and pull from.” And I don’t really like that word very much, but in terms of his songwriting and his catalog, there’s so much to choose from. I landed on Bob Dylan because he’s my favorite songwriter of all time. And I got this idea in my head that a way to work myself out of this sort of malaise that I had going on would be to book some recording time and sing someone else’s songs. “I was kind of floating around doing not very much of anything, which is a really frustrating place to be in creatively.
“I was really depressed and I had writer’s block, and I didn’t really know what to do with my life,” Swift tells InsideHook. That was the case with Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift, who released a critically acclaimed album of Dylan covers last year called Blonde on the Tracks and is currently gearing up for a slate of Dylan-themed tour dates Down Under next month. Just as Dylan so often defied genre in his own career, there’s something about his songs that encourages whoever’s performing them to get creative with it. He’s currently the second-most covered artist of all time, behind The Beatles, and his songs have attracted everyone from folk singers to country musicians, jazz artists and pop stars. As he celebrates his 80th birthday today (May 24), the songs that make up Bob Dylan’s massive catalog have come to be some of the closest things we have to modern standards.
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