P.S. Bob Dylan's Love of Archives and Notes for "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall"

"I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand & locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later."

On Monday, I wrote about Bob Dylan’s “telescope technique”: his ability to condense massive amounts of information and multiple cultural contexts into a single phrase in a single song. Perhaps the best example of this is “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Dylan explained that each line could have been its own song, but that he knew he couldn’t possibly write them all. When we examine his drafts for “A Hard Rain,” we find a web of references that Dylan explicitly notes in the margins—it’s a great visual representation of the “telescope technique.” It also grants insight into another of Dylan’s creative tactics: collecting references (from literature, folk music, and cultural history) that he might use in a future work.

So, join me as I explore Dylan’s fascination with archives and the references he collected as he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

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