Way back in 1966, Bob Dylan turned on his little portable Tascam taperecorder and laid down a couple of demos, real quick, real hot, so he didn’t forget. They bided their time, hidden in the vaults, unknown even to the hardiest Bobcats, until today!
Here is the first, entitled “If It Makes You Happy”, full of that acrid Dylan wit:
The next, My Favourite Game, is a song to a lover who can’t make up their mind:
Why have I bothered doing this?
This is a genuine question I ask myself. You might wonder if I question my questionable decisions but I do. I do! Here are some thoughts.
I was listening to a podcast on Sheryl Crow’s If It Makes You Happy and it made me realise how much I’d just written her off when I was a teenager. For teenage me, this wasn’t serious music as it was written and performed by a, shock horror, woman!
I also knew that Sheryl Crow had recorded Dylan’s Mississippi years before he released it on 2002’s Love and Theft. As a dumb 20 year old I remember thinking, “why would he let someone as lame as that have his song?”
Then I listened to the lyrics to If It Makes You Happy. “This could be Dylan”, I thought. If this had been Dylan singing it would I have written it off? One of my favourite things to do is cringe at the misogyny of my past self.
And obviously my current self is 100% enlightened. I listened to the song with my now unbiased 39-year-old ears and thought “ahhh it’s… fine.” But I could respect it. It’s hooky. It’s got funny lyrics about famous people’s detritus (just like Desolation Row!) . It’s got a sneer in the chorus. It’s Dylan, baby.
So why My Favourite Game? Well, I also just like pretending to be Dylan. It’s silly. It’s fun.
Also: The Cardigans is a band I actually now genuinely like and wrote off as a teenager due to ummmm…. yeah, it was misogyny again.
This is why I get annoyed when people claim not to have any prejudices themselves because… I sure as hell used to. And still do. Constantly working on it.