What Did You Hear?
The Music of Bob Dylan
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:6th Oct '25
£24.00
This title is due to be published on 6th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds.
“Rings hears what others don’t—because as he listens, sounds spark thoughts. This takes him inside Bob Dylan’s songs, hearing how their elements—rhythms, melodies, words, and sounds—make what we hear as whole and finished. But that way of listening also takes Rings outside the songs, to hear what others hear: the musical gestures that have shaped them, that have spoken to them. In Rings’s pages, that conversation comes fully to life.” -- Greil Marcus, author of “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs”
“What Did You Hear? sings like that Japan ’94 ‘Hard Rain,’ spotlighting not Dylan the songwriter but Dylan the performer. Through detailed argument and copious musical examples, Rings breaks down Dylan’s technique on his various instruments: voice, guitar, piano, harmonica. The sounds Dylan fans have loved for decades now have a conceptual framework, demonstrating just how much care Dylan puts into the delivery of his words, not just the writing of them. Rings knows his music theory but doesn’t rely on the reader to, making his analysis easily accessible for the layperson. The most intriguing Bob Dylan book I’ve read in some time.” -- Ray Padgett, author of “Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members”
“The best study of Bob Dylan’s musicianship to date. At once a compendium of thinking on the totality of his music and a close study of several songs, the book offers bountiful insights that will excite readers both avidly and casually interested in Dylan.” -- Sumanth Gopinath, author of “The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form”
ISBN: 9780226842653
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
360 pages