This chapter is an analysis of Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one!), based on his liner notes to Joan Baez’s live album Joan Baez in Concert, vol. 2. It was originally written for the magazine Judas!.

This and the following text, ‘Three Tambourine Men’, belong together as an exploration of the possible meaning behind Dylan’s description in Chronicles, Volume One of a system of “Mathematical music”. This chapter explores the textual evidence and the possible theoretical ramifications; the next puts the system to a practical test.

This chapter started out as a reflection upon Dylan’s concept of time on Time out of Mind, triggered, among other things, by some early reviewer who reported his surprise to find that ‘Standing in the Doorway’ lasted as long as it does. The text grew from there, however, and in its final state it is a broader study of Dylan’s experiments with time and the blues.

This short essay was originally written as a commentary to a tape compilation of selected versions of Tangled Up in Blue.

Whereas a considerable number of Dylan songs use only a limited number of chords, often the classic three-chord blues pattern, often just one sustained chord throughout a whole song (e.g. Political World), some songs stand out as far more advanced, harmonically speaking. I would like to discuss Dear Landlord from this perspective.

This chapter is probably my first attempt at using the language of functional harmony to interpret the harmonic content of a Dylan song. It may not be my best attempt, and it is probably too much of a torso to merit inclusion, were it not for its status as the first.

In any ‘Dylan’s strangest song’ contest, In the Garden will always be a strong contender. Here, I try to explain why. The ambiguity of an aug-chord is the answer.

This text was the outcome of an initial attempt to define a field of study for an analytically oriented approach to popular music. It was meant for a volume I was planning to write together with the eminent Canadian scholar and musician Mike Daley. The book never happened, but the chapter still remains, and it works quite well as an introduction to this volume as well.