That said, while I prefer cover versions of many of his songs, I don’t think anyone else could do as well with “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”.

Also from this post, I think that there is a continuum, from writing at one end, through music and dance in the middle (with composer/choreographer and performer) to something like a movie (writer, director, actors, cinematographer, etc., etc., etc.). at the other end.

Anyhow, about who writes/sings/interprets a song, I think it depends on a voice and how it is able to convey the emotion. Dylan’s “How does it FEEL?” is the perfect example. And although I think that Cohen is fantastic with how he sings some of the songs he has written (“Everybody Knows” comes to mind. Gives me shivers.), he is a better poet, overall, than he is a singer who can move me. I’ve heard a half-dozen versions of “Hallelujah”, but only Jeff Buckley’s has made me collapse in a crying puddle on the floor, stricken to the bone by the frailty of human nature and that I was a shell of a being. (Scared the pants off E, too!)

So maybe the ability of the singer/performer to interpret and bring the emotion to a given piece is what makes it good? But I’m pretty sure you all already said that.

Since this is my tribal background, I’d suggest Dylan was representative of a movement to relativism – think of his unusual vocal style as a completely unique instrument. Like, what’s her name, Iain. Or hell, Janis Joplin, who I love and who could sing a larger range, but was as polished as a chainsaw.

I imagine cookie monster death metal may have the same sort of roots, although I don’t know that sound well enough to evaluate what constitutes mastery of it. *g*.

Plus Dylan was a poet giving voice to inner reflection on the progressiveness of the time in the folk format, which is unpolished and varied as a rule, but Dylan always puts me in mind also of the the laid-back poet intellects like Piaf or Cohen or whatever. The more educated voice meets (ooh, co-opts? how to start a fight among pacifist hippies 101) the working class movement. Tom Waits without the hard living, Cohen without the sex.

It may not be particularly to Bec’s taste, and truthfully I’m not a huge fan, but it’s masterfully done and evocative. He’d got a moneyed audience looking for his sort of voice to their zeitgeist… )

I like it more than, say, a vocal acrobat like Celine. It’s, whatdyacallit, an arrangement.