Can you sing any dylan

I'd rather see my lifeblood spillin'. I traveled the road for seven long years, My pace, it really was killin'. And everywhere I went, from Gwhyna [? I thought then I'd go to where all failures go, So I boarded a ship for Australia. When I landed at Sydney, the sun it shone down On a view that was lovely and thrillin', 'Til spotting my case, with a smile on his face, Customs said: "Can you sing any Dylan, Mate?

And I usually reply, in me own quiet way, With a totally indecent suggestion. But the last straw came one night at a Sydney motel, Where I had a young girl who was willin'.

Everybody does the Dylan Voice. But that snide, smug imitation shortchanges what is, actually, a dextrous and remarkable instrument. Other singers sound like they came straight from heaven. Bob Dylan is the master of the colloquial and the conversational — he sings the way you and I do. Dylan emulated Guthrie, and you can hear it in the sing-speak style of his earliest material.

Unquestionably, his voice could cut like jagged glass, offering the opposite of a soothing listen. Instead, he provided a bracing, unvarnished realness that anyone could relate to. His wonderfully laid-back country album Nashville Skyline saw him affecting a romantic croon, supposedly the result of the musician laying off cigarettes.

That era of domestic bliss with Sara — before the dissolution heard on Blood on the Tracks — saw his vocals grow more relaxed and mature. But even the great singers have to contend with age and the inevitable changes that occur to the larynx. No longer straining, he found his comfort zone as a grizzled old pro spewing gloomy prophecy and even having a laugh or two. Dylan has never stopped recording, continuing to baffle fans with holiday albums Christmas in the Heart and a suite of Sinatra-era tunes three albums of covers now compiled on Triplicate.

He has so much more to say before his voice gives out completely. Over the decades, many musicians have covered Dylan, sometimes to brilliant effect. Often, these covers are more fetching, smoother, lit up with grace and beauty. The Coen brothers masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis concerns the title character Oscar Isaac , a struggling New York folk singer in the early s trying to make his name.

The film is a melancholy portrait of failures and never-beens — the artists who missed their moment in the sun. But we and Llewyn know his fate is sealed when the young man with the wild hair and angular features goes to the mic. And despite all the people who have tried to imitate the Dylan Voice, no one has sounded like him since.

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