Visions of Johanna

They have...

Visions of Johanna, Blonde on Blonde, 1966.

They have Mr. Tambourine Man, I've heard that one too, from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.

They have It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.

So that's 25 through 11.

Oh, wait, do they have a different top 10 on this list? Hang on.

Every Grain of Sand, Visions of Johanna, Tambourine Man.

No, I think this is the same.

Also a character in a Bo Diddley song.

In Visions of Johanna, Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it.

So you might say that bits of this song were used in other songs.

The next encounter is between an undertaker and a masked man.

Thank you.

She's Your Lover Now is one of the highly ambitious extended pieces that Dylan composed in 1966.

It consists of four 18-line verses, like Visions of Johanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile and Sad-Eyed Lady.

It's full of distinctive imagery and devastating one-liners as Dylan takes the art of songwriting itself into new places.

Uh,

visions of Johanna.

Tell me how it is that you come to decide what it is you're going to cover when you cover, uh, Dylan's music.

Well, you know, there's something about a song when you're listening to it and it kind of capsizes you in a way, at least for me, where I stop listening to it just as a fan and for pure enjoyment and think, oh gosh, I'd really love to sing this one.

So, Visions of Johanna comes to me reasonably recently in my Dylan covers, in that when I made Blonde on the Tracks, which is my album of all Bob Dylan songs, it wasn't a contender to be on that record.

And that was for two reasons.

The first was that I was already doing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, which goes for 11 minutes and 58 seconds.

So I didn't do visions there.

That was when I was, like, seven, I'd say.

Is Johanna from Visions of Johanna? Were you named after that song?

Yes.

Okay.

It stands out as a moment of defiance, but it's also important to remember it coincides with Dylan's growth as a lyricist.

If we just think about him plugging in as a symbol, We might lose sight of the fact that he was also writing songs like Desolation Row and Visions of Johanna.

There's these groundbreaking songs around that same time.

It's all of a piece.