Читать книгу The Book Of Lists - David Wallechinsky - Страница 45

Andrew Motion is a poet and biographer. His latest collection of poems, Public Property, was published in 2003, and he has written lives of Philip Larkin, John Keats and the nineteenth-century artist and criminal Thomas Wainewright. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999.

For my money, songs accumulate an even larger baggage of associations than poems. The time I first heard them, the situations – intense or otherwise – in which I have listened to them, the people who introduced them to me, or who I know also like them: all these things become attached to the lyrics as well as the melody, at once broadening the experience of listening and making it more intimate.

Turning over the pages of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–85 is like opening a Pandora’s Box crammed with my life’s delights, winces, blushes, broodings, geographies. Which in turn means that reducing his titles to any kind of list is seriously difficult. One song counted in means one (at least one) left out – and the choice is likely to change from day to day.

On the day I’m writing this, 24 May, 2004, my top 12, in album order, is:

1 Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues – for the comedy in the anger and the wit in the satire

2 Tomorrow Is a Long Time – for the tenderness and simplicity

3 The Times They are A-Changin’ – for saying all the right (but still surprising) things at the right time and every time

4 All I Really Want to Do – for the freedom it offers, and for knowing that freedom is difficult to give in fact

5 Love Minus Zero/No Limit – for being so damn beautiful

6 It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – for ‘Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you’

7 Desolation Row – for getting its arm round so much, with such a strange mixture of ease and effort

8 All Along the Watchtower – for the economy of its mystery

9 Idiot Wind – for its tender outrage

10 Hurricane – for the accuracy of its anger

11 Man Gave Names to All the Animals – for its jokes

12 O, and (out of order) Visions of Johanna – for all of the above reasons, and more besides