Eight lectures on the artists who carried a tradition across a lifetime — Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell. What it means to make art for fifty years without repeating yourself. What the road costs. What endurance means.
Before the long journey there is the tradition — blues, country, folk, gospel, the border ballad. What it means to make art from a tradition rather than against it.
Before you can understand what Bob Dylan did at Newport in 1965, or what Van Morrison was reaching for on Astral Weeks in 1968, or what Leonard Cohen meant when he said he had been working on Hallelujah for five years, you need to understand what they were all working inside: the vast, turbulent body of American roots music that constitutes the tradition these artists inherited, resisted, absorbed, and eventually carried forward.
Benjamin's 1936 essay “The Storyteller” distinguished between two figures: the storyteller, who transmits lived experience across time and communities, and the novelist, who deals with the isolated individual's search for meaning. The storyteller's wisdom is communal, handed down, part of a living chain. The American roots tradition is Benjamin's storytelling tradition: the blues carried the experience of Black life under oppression across generations; the mountain ballads carried Scottish and Irish immigrant experience into new landscapes; gospel carried the theology of a people who needed their God to be personal and immediate. The long journey artists are, at their best, storytellers in Benjamin's sense — people who transmit something larger than their own experience.
Robert Johnson recorded twenty-nine songs between 1936 and 1937, in hotel rooms in San Antonio and Dallas, for the Vocalion label. He was twenty-four or twenty-five years old. He died the following year, almost certainly poisoned, the circumstances never fully established. Those twenty-nine recordings — particularly “Cross Road Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” and “Love in Vain” — constitute one of the foundational documents of American music. Almost everything that followed in blues, rock and roll, and the long journey tradition is in dialogue with them, whether the artists knew it or not.
When Greil Marcus published Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music in 1975, he was making an argument that popular music — rock and roll, country, blues — was in genuine dialogue with the deepest currents of American mythology and self-contradiction. The book included an extended analysis of The Band that remains the most intelligent writing about that group ever produced: Marcus heard in their music the voices of a country arguing with itself about what it was and what it had done.
Marcus's method — treating popular music with the same seriousness as literature or painting — was itself a radical act in 1975, when serious cultural commentary still treated rock as entertainment. He had understood something that academic culture would take another two decades to accept: that the most important American art of the 20th century was not being made in galleries and concert halls but in recording studios and juke joints and on the radio at 2 in the morning.
Hank Williams died in the back seat of a Cadillac on New Year's Day, 1953, aged twenty-nine. In the six years of his recording career he had written and recorded “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Your Cheatin' Heart,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Lovesick Blues,” and perhaps forty other songs that have never stopped being recorded. Every country artist who followed him is working in his shadow. Dylan has said Williams is one of the most important influences on his songwriting. The direct line from Williams to Dylan to Cohen is one of the clearest genealogies in American music.
Williams is also the first clear example of what we might call the long journey artist's specific danger: the gift and the self-destruction that accompanies it. Not all long journey artists are self-destructive — Cohen lived to eighty-two with his faculties intact — but Williams, Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, and others demonstrate that the tradition carries its own hazards. The music that comes from the deepest engagement with human pain sometimes consumes its makers.
Guthrie's most devoted student who had to destroy Guthrie to become Dylan — and what happened when he picked up an electric guitar in Newport in 1965
Robert Allen Zimmerman arrived in New York City from Hibbing, Minnesota, in January 1961 with a suitcase, a guitar, and a set of borrowed myths. He had already renamed himself Bob Dylan — after Dylan Thomas, though he later denied this with characteristic misdirection — and had already begun the process of constructing a public identity so thoroughly that the private self became, for a time, almost impossible to locate. He was nineteen years old. He would spend the next sixty years refusing to be fixed by any identity he had previously occupied.
Harold Bloom argued in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) that every major poet must perform a “creative misreading” of their most important predecessor — must, in effect, misunderstand or distort the precursor in order to clear imaginative space for their own work. The relationship is Oedipal: the strong poet must, symbolically, kill the father. Dylan's relationship to Woody Guthrie is the most dramatic and public enactment of Bloom's thesis in American cultural history. Dylan did not merely learn from Guthrie; he absorbed him so completely that he became him, then had to violently disown the identification to become himself. The electric guitar at Newport was the symbolic patricide Bloom had theorised.
Dylan's early work — the first album, the Freewheelin' sessions — is saturated with Guthrie. The voice, the talking blues form, the political sympathies, the deliberate roughness of the production: all are Guthrie translated into early-1960s New York. Dylan visited the dying Guthrie repeatedly in the New Jersey hospital where he was confined, sitting at the bedside of a man who could barely speak, absorbing a tradition from its source even as the source was being extinguished.
The facts are disputed but the mythology is not. Bob Dylan walked on stage at the Newport Folk Festival on the evening of 25 July 1965 with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, plugged into an amplifier, and played three electric songs — “Maggie's Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom Engineer” — to an audience that booed. Festival organiser Pete Seeger, the patriarch of the folk revival and Guthrie's direct successor, was reportedly so distressed he wanted to cut the power cables. Dylan returned with an acoustic guitar for two more songs and left the stage.
What actually happened in the audience is genuinely contested: some witnesses heard enthusiastic cheering alongside the boos; others insist the booing was overwhelming. What is not contested is what the moment meant: Dylan had publicly rejected the folk movement's claim on him, the political community's claim on him, Guthrie's claim on him. He had declared his independence in the most theatrical way available. Emerson had said: “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Dylan left the trail at Newport. The booing was the sound of a community discovering it had been left behind.
Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) drew a distinction that is essential for understanding Dylan's career. Sincerity, Trilling argued, means being what you appear to be to others — consistency between inner life and outward expression. Authenticity means being true to your own inner self, regardless of how that appears to others. Dylan's career is one long pursuit of authenticity at the consistent expense of sincerity. The folk community wanted sincerity: the same Dylan, in the same political posture, making the same kind of music. Dylan was pursuing authenticity: the Dylan who was actually present in 1965, electric and alienated and moving away from everything Newport represented.
Dylan began the Never Ending Tour in 1988 — a commitment to continuous live performance that has seen him play over 3,000 shows in the decades since. He has transformed songs beyond recognition in live performance, changed arrangements without announcement, sometimes played without acknowledgement of the audience. He accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 without attending the ceremony, eventually submitting a lecture by video that was, characteristically, simultaneously sincere and evasive.
Four Canadians and an Arkansan who became more American than America — and what it cost them to carry that weight
The Band are the most philosophically interesting case in the long journey tradition, and perhaps the least obviously philosophical. They were not artists who wrote about ideas; they were artists whose music enacted ideas — about memory, about community, about what it means to inherit a culture that is not quite your own and to carry it forward anyway. Greil Marcus, who wrote about them better than anyone, called their music “the old, weird America.” The phrase is exact.
Paul Ricoeur argued in Oneself as Another that personal identity is constituted through narrative: you are the story you tell about yourself, but that story must maintain coherence across time even as you change. The Band's identity was entirely narrative — they were the characters in their own songs, the unnamed but specific figures of the American South who populated “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” and “Ophelia.” The coherence of their identity depended on the coherence of that narrative world. When the world became impossible to sustain — when drugs and internal tensions and the sheer weight of the tradition they were carrying became too much — the narrative had to end. The Last Waltz was the only honest conclusion.
The Band's first two albums — Music from Big Pink (1968) and the self-titled The Band (1969) — arrived at a moment when rock music was moving toward maximalism: extended solos, elaborate production, psychedelic excess. The Band moved in the opposite direction. The arrangements were spare. The production was warm and slightly murky. The songs were about farmers and sharecroppers and Civil War soldiers and small-town life. They sounded like recordings that had always existed and had only just been found.
When Eric Clapton first heard Music from Big Pink in 1968, he was at the peak of his powers as the premier British blues guitarist, fronting Cream. By his own account, hearing the album caused a crisis. He has said it made him question everything he was doing — that the Band's music, with its collective identity and its rootedness in a specific American tradition, exposed everything that was wrong with the virtuosic solo-centred approach of Cream. He broke up Cream not long after, citing the Band as a primary reason.
George Harrison had a similar response. “The Weight” appeared on the White Album's inner sleeve notes as one of Harrison's favourite songs. Harrison has said that Music from Big Pink showed him that music could be simple and profound simultaneously — that restraint was not a limitation but a form of depth. The Band's influence on what British rock music became in the early 1970s was significant and largely unacknowledged.
Levon Helm was the only American in The Band — born in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, the son of a cotton farmer — and he was, in some ways, its moral and sonic centre. His voice carried something that Robertson's songs were reaching for: an authentic rootedness in the tradition, a particular quality of lived experience that cannot be fully learned. The tension between Helm and Robertson — which would eventually fracture their relationship permanently — was partly a tension about who owned the music and who had the right to claim it.
Helm maintained for years that Robertson had taken primary songwriting credit for songs that were genuinely collaborative, that the publishing royalties had been unfairly distributed. Robertson disputed this. The argument was never fully resolved. It is the long journey tradition's oldest argument: who makes the music, and who gets to say so.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1976, at Winterland Arena in San Francisco, The Band played their final concert. They had invited a remarkable roster of guests: Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Emmylou Harris, Neil Diamond. Martin Scorsese filmed it. The resulting documentary, The Last Waltz (1978), is the most profound meditation on musical ending available on film.
Belfast, William Blake, Ray Charles — and the record made at twenty-three that he has spent fifty years in complicated conversation with
George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast in 1945, the son of a shipyard worker who collected American jazz and blues records. He grew up listening to Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, and Hank Williams. He left school at fifteen, played in showbands and skiffle groups, and by nineteen was fronting Them, a Belfast R&B group who had a minor hit with “Gloria.” He arrived in New York in 1967 with no money and a contract dispute and made Astral Weeks in three days.
The sessions for Astral Weeks took place over two days in September 1968 and one day in October, at Century Sound Studios in New York. Morrison arrived with the songs but without conventional arrangements — the jazz musicians assembled (Larry Fallon on strings, Jay Berliner on guitar, Richard Davis on bass) were given almost no instruction. They improvised around Morrison's voice and guitar, finding the music as it happened.
Morrison has said he was in a state of extreme psychological distress during the sessions — broke, legally constrained, far from home, uncertain whether he had a career at all. The record does not sound distressed. It sounds like a man who has found, in the act of making music, a space outside ordinary time where the difficulties of his situation are momentarily irrelevant. This is not escapism; it is exactly what the mystical tradition describes: the temporary breakthrough into a register of experience where the material world's claims are suspended.
Van Morrison has cited William Blake as a primary influence throughout his career — not Blake the political radical but Blake the mystic, the visionary, the man who saw angels in a tree in Peckham Rye and described the spiritual world as more real than the material one. Morrison's engagement with the Celtic mystical tradition, with Sufi poetry, with Christian mysticism, with the Hindu concept of the Atman — all of these are versions of the same intuition: that there is a register of experience accessible through art and contemplation that exceeds the ordinary material world.
Morrison is the only major popular musician who can be described without irony as a Neoplatonist. His music consistently reaches toward a realm of pure being — the “veedon fleece,” the “inarticulate speech of the heart,” the moment on “Into the Mystic” when the song seems to break through into somewhere else. This is not metaphor in Morrison's music; it is the literal intention. He is attempting, through music, to demonstrate the existence of a spiritual reality that he believes is more fundamental than the material one. Whether or not you share this belief, the music that results from pursuing it with sufficient intensity is extraordinary.
Morrison has spent fifty years in complicated relationship with Astral Weeks. He rarely performed the songs live for decades; when he did, he sometimes played them in ways that seemed designed to keep them at a distance. He has been dismissive of its canonical status, irritated by the assumption that his greatest work was done at twenty-three. He has also returned to it: the 2008 Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl recordings are his most direct public engagement with the album in the forty years since its release.
The most self-contradictory major artist of the era — and why contradiction can itself be a form of integrity
Neil Young has released over forty studio albums. He has made records of extraordinary beauty and records of deliberate ugliness. He has embraced Crazy Horse's ragged garage rock and the most clinical synthesiser production available in 1982. He has sued his own record label for releasing music that was “not representative of his work.” He has championed analogue sound quality with evangelical fervour and supported causes that contradicted his earlier positions. He is, by any conventional standard, deeply inconsistent. He is also one of the most artistically vital musicians alive at seventy-nine.
Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841) contains the most useful key to understanding Neil Young: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Young has lived this proposition so completely that it has occasionally looked like self-destruction. The synth album Trans (1982), in which Young processed his voice through a vocoder and made music about his communication with his severely disabled son, is the most extreme example: an album that alienated almost his entire audience and remains one of the most emotionally honest things he has ever made.
When Neil Young delivered Trans to Geffen Records in 1982, the label was expecting a commercially accessible follow-up to his earlier work. What they received was an electronic album in which Young sang through a vocoder on several tracks, the distorted robotic voice a deliberate reference to the computer-assisted communication systems he was using to communicate with his son Ben, who has cerebral palsy. Geffen found the album baffling and commercially catastrophic.
The label's response was extraordinary even by music industry standards: they sued Young, alleging he had deliberately delivered “uncharacteristic” and “uncommercial” music in breach of his contract. Young counter-sued. The litigation was eventually settled, but it represents one of the few cases in pop music history where an artist was sued for being too artistically adventurous. Young has said he found the whole episode clarifying. If the record company thought his most personal work was uncommercial, they had fundamentally misunderstood what he was doing.
The title of Young's 1979 album is also his artistic manifesto: rust never sleeps because it is always working, always changing, always finding new ways into the material. For Young, creative stasis is equivalent to death — the artist who keeps making the same record is not maintaining quality, they are rusting while appearing polished. The philosopher Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice, because both you and the river have changed. Young has applied this to his career with a rigour that has occasionally looked like self-sabotage but is in fact the most consistent artistic commitment in his generation.
The twenty-year Hallelujah, the bankruptcy, the return at seventy-three, the kneeling — amor fati made audible
Leonard Cohen published his first collection of poetry at twenty-two, his first novel at twenty-eight, and released his first album at thirty-three. He considered himself primarily a poet who had been seduced by the singer-songwriter form, and spent much of his career apologising, implicitly, for the music's commercial success while continuing to make it. He died in November 2016 at eighty-two, having released an album — You Want It Darker — seventeen days before his death. It is one of the great acts of artistic completion in the history of popular music.
Nietzsche's concept of amor fati — love of fate — describes the highest affirmation available to a human being: the willingness to embrace not just the good but everything that has happened, the suffering and failure and loss as well as the joy, as the necessary condition of the life one has actually lived. Cohen's late work is amor fati in practice. “You Want It Darker” — addressed, with characteristic ambiguity, either to God or to a lover or to mortality itself — does not flinch from the darkness it names. It affirms the darkness as the condition of the light. This is not resignation. It is the most complete affirmation of a life available to someone who has lived one honestly.
Cohen wrote “Hallelujah” over a period that has been variously reported as two years and five years. He produced eighty drafts of the lyric by some accounts. The song appeared on Various Positions in 1984, which his label Columbia refused to release in the United States, considering it uncommercial. John Cale covered it. Jeff Buckley covered Cale's arrangement, and Buckley's version became the one that made the song a global phenomenon — after Buckley's death in 1997. Cohen had been performing the song live for fifteen years before the world discovered it through a dead man's interpretation of another dead man's arrangement.
Cohen spent much of the 1990s at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in the San Bernardino Mountains, where he was a student and eventually ordained as a monk under the name Jikan — “the silent one.” He returned to the world in 1999 to discover that his manager, Kelley Lynch, had stolen the majority of his retirement savings — estimates range from $5 million to significantly more. Cohen, now in his mid-sixties, had almost no money.
His response was to go back on the road. The tours from 2008 to 2013 — his first live performances in fifteen years — were by general agreement some of the greatest sustained concert experiences of the era. He performed for three hours at a time, kneeling at the edge of the stage between songs because his knees were giving out. He tipped his fedora to the audience between every song. He introduced the band with evident joy. He played in venues across six continents to audiences who had waited, in some cases, for decades to hear him live. The bankruptcy had, in the most literal possible way, saved his artistic life: it had sent him back to the work.
Cohen recorded You Want It Darker in his living room in Los Angeles in 2016, too frail to travel to a conventional studio. His son Adam produced it. The Shaar Hashomayim synagogue choir in Montreal — the synagogue where Cohen had been bar mitzvahed, the tradition he had never fully left — recorded their parts and sent them. Cohen knew he was dying. He made a record about dying that is also a record about the necessity of the darkness, the nature of God's demands, and the strangeness of gratitude in extremity.
Blue, the jazz turn that cost her the audience, the aneurysm, the long silence — and the Newport return in 2023
Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, in 1943. She contracted polio at nine, spent time in hospital, and has said that the experience of isolation and physical vulnerability shaped both her inner life and her relationship to music as a private language. She married Chuck Mitchell in 1965, gave up a daughter for adoption, and took his surname before leaving him. She arrived in New York in 1967 carrying a guitar with a non-standard tuning she had invented because her left hand, weakened by polio, could not make conventional chord shapes. The tuning became a signature; the limitation became a foundation.
Lionel Trilling's distinction between sincerity and authenticity applies to Mitchell with particular force, and particular complication. The folk and singer-songwriter tradition she entered in the late 1960s expected a certain kind of sincerity from women: direct emotional expression, confessional lyric, the audience's expectations confirmed. Mitchell gave them that on Blue, then spent the next decade systematically refusing it — moving toward jazz, toward complexity, toward formal experimentation that her audience found difficult and her critics found alienating. This is Trilling's authenticity: the pursuit of inner truth at the cost of the appearance of consistency. The female artist who pursues authenticity at this cost pays a higher price than the male artist who does the same.
Blue (1971) was recorded at a moment of personal crisis: Mitchell had ended significant relationships, was travelling alone through Europe, had achieved commercial success that felt hollow. The album that resulted is the most emotionally exposed record in the singer-songwriter tradition — a record in which the gap between the artist's inner life and the performance of that inner life is essentially zero. Mitchell has said she was “naive” to make it, that she exposed herself beyond what was wise. She has also said it is the most honest thing she has ever done.
In June 2023, Joni Mitchell performed at the Newport Folk Festival — her first festival performance in over fifty years. She had suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 that had severely affected her speech and movement; she had spent years in rehabilitation, relearning to walk and to play guitar. She performed for ninety minutes, backed by a band that included many of the best musicians of her generation. She played “Both Sides Now,” “A Case of You,” “Shine.” The audience wept.
Mitchell has said that the aneurysm, paradoxically, freed her. She no longer had the physical capacity for perfectionism; she had to play what she could play, in the voice she still had, with the technique that remained. The result was a performance of extraordinary emotional directness — the defences that technique can become had been stripped away by necessity. She was eighty years old. She was present in a way that younger, more technically proficient performers rarely are. The long journey had arrived at a place where the weight had become the music itself.
After Blue and its immediate successors, Mitchell moved toward jazz — first incorporating jazz musicians into her rock arrangements on Court and Spark (1974), then moving fully into jazz territory on The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Hejira (1976), and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977). The move cost her commercial audience. Critics who had celebrated her confessional mode found the new direction difficult. She was accused of self-indulgence, of abandoning her strengths, of making music for musicians rather than listeners.
The accusation reveals more about the accusers than the accused. Mitchell had decided that the confessional mode — however honest, however successful — was a container she had outgrown. She pursued the music she needed to make regardless of the reception. Adrienne Rich, in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), described the female artist's necessity of refusing the forms that have been given to her and finding her own: not the forms women are expected to inhabit, but the forms that the actual inner life demands. Mitchell's jazz turn is this refusal, at the cost of the audience that had formed around the earlier work.
What Frost's roads, Bloom's anxiety, Cohen's grace, Dylan's reinvention, and Neil Young's rust add up to — the long journey as philosophical commitment
Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken” is the most misread poem in American literature. It is universally understood as a celebration of individualism — the brave choice of the less-travelled road, the satisfaction of having made the unconventional decision. What it actually describes is something more unsettling: a speaker who makes a choice, knows that it is essentially arbitrary (the two roads are, in the poem, virtually identical), and then constructs a retrospective narrative that makes the choice seem meaningful and inevitable. “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” The long journey artist is Frost's speaker: the meaning is constructed retrospectively, from the accumulated weight of the choices made.
Paul Ricoeur argued that identity is not a fixed essence but a narrative achievement: you are the story you tell about yourself, maintained across time through the coherence of that story even as you change. The long journey artist makes this visible. Dylan's narrative identity is not “folk singer” or “electric rocker” or “Christian” or “Nobel laureate” but something that encompasses all of these while being reducible to none of them: the coherence of the reinvention itself, the consistency of the refusal to be consistent. Cohen's narrative identity is the man who made the long game of failure and grace into an art form. Mitchell's is the woman who followed the inner necessity wherever it led, regardless of the audience's wishes. Young's is the man who let the rust do its work. The long journey artists are, taken together, an argument about what artistic identity actually is: not a fixed position but a commitment to the process of becoming.
No account of the long journey tradition is complete without Nebraska (1982), the album Springsteen made alone in a bedroom in New Jersey on a four-track cassette recorder, which he then delivered to Columbia Records as the follow-up to The River. It was an act of radical artistic austerity by a rock star at the height of his commercial powers — the equivalent, in some ways, of Dylan going electric, but in the opposite direction: stripping back rather than amplifying, moving toward silence rather than noise.
In Paris in 1985, Leonard Cohen encountered Bob Dylan in a café near Notre-Dame. Dylan, recognising Cohen, asked him what he had been working on. Cohen mentioned that he had been writing a particular song for five years. Dylan, reportedly surprised, asked him how long it took to write. Cohen said five years, maybe longer. Dylan said: “That's a long time. It took me fifteen minutes to write 'Blowin' in the Wind.'”
Cohen, according to his own account of the exchange, replied: “That's funny, because for me it sometimes takes fifteen minutes and sometimes it takes five years. But the song we're talking about is a different kind. I wanted to make sure every verse had the same rigour and depth as the best verse you had ever written.” The song was “Hallelujah.” Dylan's fifteen-minute songs and Cohen's five-year songs are not different values; they are different methods in service of the same commitment: getting the thing right, whatever that costs.
The title of The Band's most celebrated song has always been slightly mysterious. What weight? The song itself is narratively ambiguous — a series of figures asking for help, being asked for help, trying to put their load down and finding they cannot. It has been read as a religious allegory, as a meditation on the burden of the musical tradition, as a simple story about exhausted travellers. All of these readings are available, and the song accommodates them all.
For the purposes of these lectures, the weight is the tradition. It is the blues Robert Johnson recorded in a hotel room in 1937. It is Hank Williams dying in the back seat of a Cadillac. It is Woody Guthrie in the New Jersey hospital, unable to speak. It is what Dylan took from Guthrie and had to put down to become Dylan. It is what The Band carried for a decade and could not carry any longer. It is what Van Morrison has been trying to put into words since Belfast. It is what Cohen carried into the room with the Shaar Hashomayim choir. It is what Young refuses to put down even when it would be easier. It is what Mitchell carries in her left hand, the hand weakened by polio, which found its own way to make music.
The long journey artists do not resolve the weight. They do not put it down. What they demonstrate, collectively, is that carrying it across a lifetime — with intelligence, with integrity, with the willingness to be changed by it — is itself a form of meaning. The road matters because of who walks it and how. The weight matters because of who carries it and why. These are not answers. They are the most honest questions available.
If you leave this series with one instruction: listen to Blood on the Tracks, then Blue, then Astral Weeks, then Music from Big Pink, then Songs of Leonard Cohen, then You Want It Darker. Listen to them in the order they were made and in the order listed. By the end you will have heard a conversation across sixty years between artists who never fully understood each other but were all asking the same questions. The weight was real. The road was long. They carried it anyway.
Leave a comment on this series. Requires a free GitHub account.