Finding and losing a voice

What does it take to turn artistic talent into its full creative expression? Then, once you’ve found your authentic artistic voice, how can you stop critics and followers over-defining it until you feel penned-in to the point of paralysis? And if you finally lose your voice altogether, how do you find it again? Bob Dylan’s brilliant autobiography Chronicles invites us to share that creative voyage, to listen to his emerging artistic voice. Singing is only a small part of the story. It is much, much bigger than that.

The story starts as abruptly and arrestingly as one of his own ballads, when the 20-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrives in New York in 1961 wanting to sing folk songs. Where he came from is unimportant to this particular story. All we need to know is that he had talent and boundless self-confidence. He knew he had ‘it’. He just wasn’t quite sure what ‘it’ was.