Masterful song construction with a hard-edged delivery, that’s Bob Dylan in a nutshell.
In one of Dylan’s early works, both the song title and lyric warn that ”The times they are a’ changing.” But whether times have changed since then is debatable.
The best selling book of all time, The Bible, says that everything that is has already been and there is nothing new under the sun.
So who is right, Dylan or Ecclesiastes?
Maybe both.
Perhaps people seek the illusion of change in order to feel some sort of progression in their lives. Or perhaps things really are changing but in the grand scheme of eternal time, what seems to us like a fast paced evolution of conditions is really just the slow wheel of circumstance on it’s umpteenth journey all the way around and back to square one.
What I know for sure is that the world we live in today is not the world we baby boomers envisioned when we were young, when Bob Dylan wrote this song. Still, the song itself is a wonderful piece of art and sometimes, art is all we have. All we need.
Written by Dan King www.purpleaz.com
