There are certainly a lot of people - and I won't name names - who are getting by simply on expression. And I guess that's valuable in some sense. But songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.
Jakob DylanThose things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.
Jakob DylanTo us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.
Jakob DylanI relate more to the descendants of Galileo Galilei and the Wright brothers than I do to anyone else you might mention. If you could name someone working today who I could relate to, I'd be both surprised and thrilled.
Jakob DylanArtists are not going to put somebody new in the president's chair. It's all worth the effort; it all needs to be done. But I don't look at songwriting as having the ability to necessarily do that today.
Jakob DylanI don't want to sing songs and write songs that need to have images behind them that are of a specific time. The times we live in today - I mean, there's a lot to work with. But I think that if I was my age in 1975 or 1985, I would have felt the same way because that's what I gravitate toward.
Jakob Dylan