The unified theory is that Dylan just sort of smooshed together music and poems into new songs, like a sausage making machine. > Which leads us to my Unified F

The unified theory is that Dylan just sort of smooshed together music and poems into new songs, like a sausage making machine. > Which leads us to my Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan. The theory isn’t especially complicated or even novel... In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source. > “These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said. “I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. . . . If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. > “All these songs are connected,” he went on. “I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.” I though that was sort of a given. That's how creativity seems to work for everybody. I'm trying hard to think of some exceptions. I don't know that it's "unified" either, since it doesn't explain why his songs are different than other people's songs. It doesn't explain very much, really. But it's still a pretty good article. I liked that it wasn't trying to destroy the myth or somehow take down the artist, which I was afraid it would try to do.