Preamble

My Dylan and folk music obsession continues to progress. I was struck by the thought of how good something has to be to be “arranged”.

In his autobiography Dave van Ronk mentioned the sheer amount of creativity that goes into an arrangement of a well-known song. Related – I’ve been working on a bluegrass version of one of Leonard Cohen’s middle period songs.

The Gist

Then I listened to a bunch of Dylan outtakes and was struck by how much a song needed to be refined before it could be arranged. A lot of the earlier versions were good, but not much more than that. The final versions were instant classics that benefit the world.