THE SONGS THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
All roads lead back to Bob Dylan. On countless albums since 1962, across any genre, you can find that hallowed surname in the credits. Crunch the numbers – his catalogue of 600-plus songs is eclipsed by more than 6,000 covers – and you’ll start to grasp why the Universal Music Group paid the 80-year-old songwriter a reported £225 million for his publishing rights in 2020. After all, to own Dylan’s originals is not a goldmine to be sniffed at – but to profit from his branches and tributaries is practically a royalty statement with no end.
Even beyond his towering influence, that rollcall of cover versions ensures that Dylan, then and now, is everywhere: a common strand of DNA that courses through Guns N’ Roses, Sonic Youth and the Grateful Dead, sprawls across the degrees of separation between XTC, Cheap Trick and Fairport Convention.
“My old songs, they’ve got something,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2006. “I think my songs have been covered maybe not as much as White Christmas or Stardust, but there’s a list of over five thousand recordings. That’s a lot of people covering your songs. They must have something. If I was me, I’d cover my songs too.”
Almost from the moment Dylan inked his first publishing deal – brokered in 1962 by Lou Levy of Leeds Music Publishing – the Dylan cover has been part of the furniture. Back then, in the early 60s, within three weeks of Dylan, Peter, Paul And Mary had covered it, adding their own harmony-draped (if slightly twee) thumbprint.
