Jakob Dylan

“I'm not somebody who carries around a notepad and writes songs all day long. I don't imagine everything I think of is worth being in a song. So I tend to collect notes, and I set time aside to go to work and write songs.”

“We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.”

“Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.”

“You might have a favorite band and really dislike one of the records. That's fine.”

“When I listen back to my music and everyone else that's out there, I'm aware that there's something I can do that the next guy doesn't do.”

“I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively - and there were a lot of choices - writing songs was king.”

“It's a little gross to put yourself in every song. I mean, how interesting do people really think you are?”

“To 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.”

“If I'm judged against my peers, rather than anyone else we could both think of, then I reckon I deserve to make records.”

“I don't feel like I chose to do music as much as I made a decision to not stop doing music.”

“Writing songs is a trade like anything else.”

“I've got a life that really matters to me, and that's because of the way I was raised. My ethics are high because my parents did a great job.”

“My songs have always had hope and perseverance in them - I never write songs that have no escape hatch, no positivity.”

“If people want to talk about Bob Dylan, I can talk about that. But my dad belongs to me and four other people exclusively. I'm very protective of that. And telling people whether he was affectionate is telling people a lot. It has so little to do with me. I come up against a wall.”

“You couldn't really like a bad guitar in 1960 'cause everybody was pretty good.”

“I got to watch my heroes meet him and saw how they reacted, whether it was Joe Strummer or Tom Waits. It was peculiar. I'm so stoked to meet Tom Waits, and he's so nervous to meet my dad. It's a head spin.”

“If all you were left believing was what you were seeing, it'd be nothing but desperate. To have hope, you're going to have to imagine that there's something behind the curtain.”

“Some people just can't get over their own hang-ups to listen to my music.”

“I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don't over-intellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it's something you do if you put the work in.”

“Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.”