Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I said this to Paul Schrader on my podcast once. I don’t know, Bob Dylan’s ability . . . For instance, he said that he wrote the Kennedy song. There was some interview that he gave where he’s like, “Yes, I wrote this song.” He said something about where in time he wrote it that was just not true because he didn’t want to talk about the fact of when he’d actually come up with it, which was recently to comment about the world we were really living in. I think he told some story about writing it seven years ago or something like that. I think he’s great at taking pressure off himself throughout his career from any externality. I think the clue is what he said when he won that award, when he said, “My father said to me that a man can debase himself so much that even his own family will turn his back on them, but God never will.” I tie that to the thing he wrote in the book of lyrics, that poem he wrote about Woody — not “Song to Woody,” but that poem he wrote about Woody, when he talks about going to the hospital to visit Woody. Woody Guthrie, for those who don’t know — I know you know, but just people who don’t know — when he goes to the hospital to visit Woody, and Woody let him clean his bedpans and stuff because Woody wanted to show Bob that no man should be a hero to another man, that he was just a person. He produced this work because of what he was willing to do to himself to produce this work. I think there’s something about that moment, and Bob saying the thing about debasing himself, and all the shit he made up in Chronicles — the lesson is that none of the externalities matter. Yes, Bob wanted success, and it’s always confusing with Bob because he’s a multi-headed hydra and all that stuff. But at core, he is this writer who always found a way to hear only his own voice and to have the confidence and comfort to then serve and produce that voice only for those people who were willing to try to hear it. I think, as any kind of an artist, that’s almost impossible to do. You tell yourself you can, but it’s very difficult to do it because there’s all sorts of other considerations that come into play. It seems to me that only Dylan and Miles and Chuck Berry were able and willing to do that. Bruce [Springsteen] had Jon Landau, who he could bounce this stuff off to make a third thing out of it. REM did that for five years, but Bob has done that for 60 years. It’s crazy. Do you think that the read I have of Dylan and what he does — does it line up with your read? Absolutely. “Study the past” is another career lesson from Dylan, I think, and just keep on going, be willing to reinvent yourself, and choose your audiences wisely, the ones you care about. Yes. Be willing to reinvent yourself, not in the . . . David Bowie is a great artist, too, but a different kind of artist. To me, anyway, not reinvent yourself to fit the times, but be willing to reinvent yourself because it’s what your inner voice is telling you you need to do to stay an artist, I think is what he’s doing.…

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