Expecting Rain

It wasn’t the words that drove him, he said; it wasn’t the melody, it wasn’t the ideas, it wasn’t self-expression. Rather, it was a sound in his mind. “The sound I’m trying to get across, I’m not just up there recreating old blues tunes or trying to invent some surrealistic rhapsody … I’m not doing it to see how good I can sound, or how perfect the melody can be, or how intricate the details can be woven or how perfectly written something can be. I don’t care about those things.”

“The sound is that compelling to you?” I asked.

“Mmm-hnh,” he said.

It wasn’t just the voice, it was the entire fabric of sound on a track:

“I always hear other instruments, how they should sound. The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound. I haven’t been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly I’ve been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ, but now I find myself going into territory that has more percussion in it and [pause] rhythms of the soul.”