But there are two extra influences – the instrument the songwriter was using as the song was composed, and the key. In songwriting each writer has his/her own favourite turns of phrase, melodic moments, chord changes etc. We tend to use certain words and certain phrases far more often that other phrases, and we’re each different in this regard. And this I suspect is a major point – a point perhaps missed in other commentaries.Įvery songwriter gets into habits – just as we all have habits within our speech.

Although we found something a bit deeper: Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink: Spinning Reels Of RhymeĪpart from the fact that the song came to Dylan quickly, we don’t how Dylan wrote this song words first, music first, at the piano, on guitar…? But what I notice is that it is in E flat – which is a very unusual key for him. All we have from Dylan is a comment in an interview about being influenced by Keats which is thought by many commentators to be a deliberately off-putting line for a journalist.

Of course Dylan doesn’t comment directly on such things. Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink: Spinning Reels Of Rhyme.Bob Dylan Has His Blake, And Keats It Too.Eden Is Where You Find It: Frederich Nietzsche, William Blake, And Bob Dylan.Throughout this site there are a number of articles linking Dylan to William Blake, which you might like to take in… for example If we think of Dylan we might think of Blind Willy McTell as a song that Dylan felt wasn’t ready, or indeed Caribbean Wind which might seem to be completely there to us, but not quite in Dylan’s view.įor this song, Dylan had an immediate influence and inspiration with William Blake’s “ Auguries of Innocence” We tend to know artists not by the fact that they exclusively create work without preliminaries (or vice versa) but whether they tend towards one approach or the other. The artist knows in a holistic way how it should work, but the details just won’t come through. No editing, no tortured weeks of trying to make it work – it just was.Īlmost every artist in every art form has events like this, as well as the the opposite – the works or parts of a work that simply will not come out right. “ Every Grain of Sand” is one of the few songs that Dylan has described in terms of writing – he reports that it came to him in one go and that was it. Updated 19 October with a few changes and this link to newly released version – here it is

Clan lord grain of sand