| "The Times They Are a-Changin'" | |||||||
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Outer sleeve of the 1965 Swedish release. |
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| Single by Bob Dylan | |||||||
| from the album The Times They Are a-Changin' | |||||||
| Released | 1964 (album) 1965 (single) |
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| Format | 7" | ||||||
| Recorded | October 24, 1963 at Columbia Studios, New York City | ||||||
| Genre | Folk | ||||||
| Length | 3:15 | ||||||
| Label | Columbia | ||||||
| Writer(s) | Bob Dylan | ||||||
| Producer | Tom Wilson | ||||||
| Bob Dylan singles chronology | |||||||
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"The Times They Are a-Changin'" is a song written by Bob Dylan and released as the title track of his 1964 album, The Times They Are a-Changin'. The song was ranked #59 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.[1]
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Dylan appears to have written the song in September and October 1963. He recorded it as a Witmark publishing demo that month, a version that was finally released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. The song was then recorded at the Columbia studios in New York on October 23 and 24,[2] and the latter session yielded the version that became the title song of Dylan's third album.[3]
Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe: "This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads ...'Come All Ye Bold Highway Men', 'Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time."[4]
Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin recounts how Tony Glover stopped by Dylan's apartment in September 1963, picked up a page of the song Dylan was working on and read a line from it: "'Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call.' Turning to Dylan, Glover said, 'What is this shit, man?' Dylan shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'Well, you know, it seems to be what the people want to hear.'"[5]
Dylan critic Michael Gray called it "the archetypal protest song." Gray commented, "Dylan's aim was to ride upon the unvoiced sentiment of a mass public—to give that inchoate sentiment an anthem and give its clamour an outlet. He succeeded, but the language of the song is nevertheless imprecisely and very generally directed."[3] Gray suggests that the song has been outdated by the very changes that it gleefully predicted, and hence the song was politically out of date almost as soon as it was written.
Literary critic Christopher Ricks suggests that the song transcends the political preoccupations of the time in which it was written. Ricks argues that Dylan is still performing the song, and when he sings "Your sons and your daughter/Are beyond your command", he sings inescapably with the accents not of a son, no longer perhaps primarily a parent, but with the attitude of a grandfather. Ricks concludes: "Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children look like becoming yuppies. And then Republicans..."[6]
Critic Andy Gill points out that the song's lyrics echo lines from the Book of Ecclesiastes which Pete Seeger adapted to create his anthem "Turn, Turn, Turn!". The climactic line about the first later being last, likewise, is a direct scriptural reference to Mark 10:31: "But many that are first shall be last, and the last first."[7]
Less than a month after Dylan recorded the song, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The next night, Dylan opened a concert with "The Times They Are a-Changin'"; he told biographer Anthony Scaduto: "I thought, 'Wow, how can I open with that song? I'll get rocks thrown at me.' But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding the song. And I couldn't understand why they were clapping, or why I wrote the song. I couldn't understand anything. For me, it was just insane."[8]
In 1994, "The Times They Are a-Changin'" was licensed for use in U.S. TV advertisements for the auditing and accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand, as performed by Richie Havens; in 1996, the song was sung by a children's choir in an advertisement for the Bank of Montreal.[10] In 2005, it was used in a television advertisement for insurance company Kaiser Permanente.[11] In 2009, the song was featured on the opening sequence of the film Watchmen.
The "Dylan Covers Database"[12] listed 436 recordings, including bootlegs, of this song as of October 19, 2009, including 85 versions of it by "Bob Walkenhorst", recorded live between March 2004 and September 2009, at "Molly's Irish Pub" in Kansas City. According to the same database, the song has been recorded in at least 14 other languages (Catalán, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish & Swedish).
John Mellencamp made a home-video recording of the song on a web-cam on September 2, 2008 and posted it on his website the next day as a statement about the possible change the 2008 presidential election could bring to the United States.
In 2009, filmmaker Michael Moore sang the third verse of the song live on The Jay Leno Show after being told that he had to "earn" a clip from his film Capitalism: A Love Story to be shown.[13]
On December 10, 2010, Dylan's hand-written lyrics of the song were sold at auction at Sotheby's, New York, for $422,500. They were purchased by a hedge fund manager.[14]
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