Bob Dylan (post 2), winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, is famous for alternating personality: switching name, life story, demeanor, attitude, and voice.

“In 1960, a nineteen-year-old aspiring singer/songwriter born Robert Allen Zimmerman cast aside his given name and adopted…Bob Dylan. It would be the first in an ongoing series of fabrications, fables, and rumors about his life story. Soon the singer had spun so many tales about his background that it was impossible to know who he really was…

“His life story changed as he proceeded onward in his journey, as, remarkably, did his physiognomy and everyday appearance. Like the Greek sea deity Proteus…Bob Dylan…had the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time…he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day he’d look like a little gnome, and one day he’d be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he’d look like a thirteen-year-old child…

“You would never know what his voice was going to sound like. One of the other fascinating, if obvious, things about Bob Dylan’s chameleonic personality was the way the timbre of his voice would change…

Said Dylan, “I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time” (1, front flap and Introduction).

Can you tell me something about the songs and ideas involved?

“…I don’t really write about anything. I don’t know where these come from…sometimes I don’t know what I’m writing about until years later it becomes clearer to me.

Do you find that as a composer you’re more like a medium…?

“I think that every composer does that. No one in his right mind would think that it was coming from him, that he had invented it. It’s just coming through him.

What kind of force compels you to write?

“Well, any departure, like from my traditional self, will kick it off” (1, pp. 241-242).

1. Jonathan Cott (Editor). Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York, Wenner Books, 2006.