we never did too much talking anyway

but don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Normally, I have written and revised and written and revised something in my head countless times before I ever put a single word down. I write much more in my crammed but often useless brain than ever sees the light of elsewhere; there are oh-so-many things that I think about telling you and so very few that I actually do.

I say this as a way to tell you that I had initially written an entire essay in my head about how I did not go see Bob Dylan a few weeks ago because the weight of a Dylan show alone was too much to face. I was going to tell you about how there is certain music I am haunted by because I am haunted by the people that I have associated with the sounds and sometimes a person does not want to spend $200 to hang out with their ghosts.

In the days that have brought me to this one, I have loved a lot of people who have loved Bob Dylan. Nothing about this should be considered a surprise. I have had friends and loves and almosts for whom he was a touchstone.

In high school, one of my closest friends and I would have slumber parties where we’d pour over the music and the imagery and the myths of Dylan during the time that more well-adjusted girls might have used to talk about the boys in their geometry classes. We’d read interviews and lyrics, dissect footage and photos – looking for proof that life was mostly storytelling and bullshitting and if you were clever enough you could make your life whatever you might want it to be.

We don’t speak anymore, she and I, not really. The facts of our lives having displaced the lore of our idols, we found less and less to come back to.

In the many years since then, I have loved men who loved Dylan more than I loved Dylan and I have loved men who have loved Dylan more than they loved me. Nothing about this should be considered a failing.

But sometimes there are hands you want to hold when you stand in a crowd and sometimes the reminder of their absence in public is too much of a headache to spend $200 for when you could have that same reminder at home on your couch for free.

I was going to tell you all about this and some of the sentences I’d written in my head were going to be more concise and more clever and then I was going to leave you with a playlist of Dylan’s most haunting songs so that you could be haunted too…

But I checked the ticket prices a week before, and then a day before, and then two hours before and eventually the price was palatable and so I went to the show. And all of the things I was going to tell you became a little less relevant.

It turns out sometimes a person is willing to spend $60 to invite the ghosts in.  

The ghosts of friends and loves and almosts surely showed up, but so did hundreds of strangers and Bob Dylan and his band. And yes, we were haunted, all of us in our own ways, but still we danced.

The ghosts and the strangers and Bob Dylan and me.

---

To make a definitive Bob Dylan playlist would be to set aside ghosts and court poltergeists, so I will not say this is anything of the sort. It’s also not the haunting songs list I threatened above. This is simply a playlist I made back in 2017 of the Dylan songs I loved best in that moment and they still do the trick for me most of the time.

---

---

OTHER THINGS:

• My family has some land about ninety minutes outside of town where I go to be near the cows and watch the clouds go by slowly under the sweltering sun and stare into the middle distance. One of the first times I went out there, my mom trained me on how to get settled in – where to find the skeleton key that would unlock the doors, which lights worked, where to get the water to flush the toilet, where to leave trash, how to put gas in the four wheelers and.. most importantly, how to work the old radio so that it wouldn’t feel lonely when the sun went down. She showed me which stations were usually strong enough to come in clear, and where to look for back-ups when their broadcast signal failed. An art. The first night I spent out there on my own I spent ages twisting the dial, searching in the static for the gems. Mostly country, mostly old. There’s internet out there now, and a dusty stack of CDs as a back-up to the infinite listening possibilities that the internet brings, but I still turn to the radio to soundtrack the time I spend out there when I get the chance to escape.  
  
  This, likely, is why the first time I listened to the new Beyonce album – driving through city streets and still feeling not quite urban because Cowboy Carter was released as the bluebonnets were still bursting into bloom along the highways that run through Austin – the thing that grabbed me first, told me that I was all-in, were the faux-radio broadcast interstitials of Willie Nelson. There’s a lot to dig into in Beyonce’s not-country-country album, but the Red Headed Stranger playing DJ coming through the static is what first got its hooks into me. On later, closer listen, these little interludes are of course, just a minor note across the album’s 27 tracks. As a piece of work, the album is sprawling and it is strange and it is attempting to wrap its arms around everything that has and might still occur under an unforgiving sun. And every now and then Willie Nelson’s voice comes in to remind you that everything comes from somewhere. These little skits are, perhaps, unnecessary but they also the most of-a-place part of the thing. They’re the part that reminds me that despite what the album’s now inescapable single might say – for some of us, this is still Texas. It might always be.

• I joined a book club at the beginning of the year and most recently we read a novel set in the weird timeless days of the pandemic and the book was mostly fine, I guess, but during the discussion of it one of the questions that was posed was what other (if any) works that touch on those strange times we find meaningful and I didn’t say this then because I’m still finding my way in that group of strangers but the opening track of Phosphorescent’s new album Revelator, which is also Revelator, is my answer. May always be my answer. “I got tired of sadness, I got tired of all the madness, I got tired of being a bad ass all the time” is the thesis statement of a song and an album that is an acknowledgement of strange struggle and coming out on the other side. It is a salve and a balm and not a moment too soon.

• I love the new John Moreland album, Visitor, so much. I love it so much I don’t want to tell you anything about it other than the fact that you need it in your life and in your ears. Go form your own opinion of it and come back and tell me why I’m right.

---

Listen to Ted Hawkins.