Matt Ross - Designer. A while ago I had a Bob Dylan phase. I say a while, maybe 10 years ago. Having had one, I think everyone should. Around that time I’d discovered that every other pop song that caught my ear was a cover of a Dylan classic. In fact everyone across all genres seems to have covered him at some time. A quick Google brought up this stat: “Current listings contain 5870 covers of 350 different Dylan songs by 2791 artists”.Personally, I just loved the fact that someone could be so successful with a singing voice that - to quote Bowie - sounds like ‘sand and glue’. It meant there may well be hope for me!Then I realised his output of albums was quite simply phenomenal. That really he has never stopped touring. That actually the lyrics to his songs were unbelievably poetic. That some of them were in fact entire stories. That it was incredibly hard work, and I wanted to know what inspired him to work so hard.And that’s what this blog is about. Not Bob - but inspiration.As a creative I have been asked in the past where I garner inspiration from. Who inspires me, and where a particular idea came from? But I don’t think inspiration is a Who, or a Where or even a What. The word itself is quite difficult to define. Think about it for a while. How would you define inspiration? I guess it is the stimulus, or inception of an idea. The falling apple of Newton’s theory of gravity. Mandela’s incredulity with the apartheid system. Ghandi’s sense of injustice. All these great people had a great cause. Our causes may not be so great, but still we need to search for and find our own inspiration. I read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, searching to find where he drew his inspiration from. Was it a person? Was it an experience? But all I discovered was an incredibly engaging story about the travels and troubles of a musician struggling to find that break, and then continuing to struggle afterwards. In fact what struck me most was the incredible detail that was included throughout his autobiography. What people were wearing, what music was playing while he was in a back room, the books in a library, the headlines in the papers. Even if I kept a diary I’d struggle to remember these things from one day to the next. And then it struck me just what all these and other great people had in common - all of their inspiration came from one common denominator: Observation.
The trouble with Bob Dylan
Matt Ross - Designer. A while ago I had a Bob Dylan phase. I say a while, maybe 10 years ago. Having had one, I think everyone should. Around that time I’d discovered that every other pop song that caught my ear was a cover of a Dylan classic. In fact everyone across all genres seems to have covered him at some time. A quick Google brought up this stat: “Current listings contain 5870 covers of 350 different Dylan songs by 2791 artists”.Personally, I just loved the fact that someone could be so successful with a singing voice that - to quote Bowie - sounds like ‘sand and glue’. It meant there may well be hope for me!Then I realised his output of albums was quite simply phenomenal. That really he has never stopped touring. That actually the lyrics to his songs were unbelievably poetic. That some of them were in fact entire stories. That it was incredibly hard work, and I wanted to know what inspired him to work so hard.And that’s what this blog is about. Not Bob - but inspiration.As a creative I have been asked in the past where I garner inspiration from. Who inspires me, and where a particular idea came from? But I don’t think inspiration is a Who, or a Where or even a What. The word itself is quite difficult to define. Think about it for a while. How would you define inspiration? I guess it is the stimulus, or inception of an idea. The falling apple of Newton’s theory of gravity. Mandela’s incredulity with the apartheid system. Ghandi’s sense of injustice. All these great people had a great cause. Our causes may not be so great, but still we need to search for and find our own inspiration. I read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, searching to find where he drew his inspiration from. Was it a person? Was it an experience? But all I discovered was an incredibly engaging story about the travels and troubles of a musician struggling to find that break, and then continuing to struggle afterwards. In fact what struck me most was the incredible detail that was included throughout his autobiography. What people were wearing, what music was playing while he was in a back room, the books in a library, the headlines in the papers. Even if I kept a diary I’d struggle to remember these things from one day to the next. And then it struck me just what all these and other great people had in common - all of their inspiration came from one common denominator: Observation.
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