Interview

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Jakob Dylan and I first met in the early '90s. I was working in the music business, finding and developing new talent, and a mutual friend slipped me the new demos that Jakob and his band, the Wallflowers, had just finished recording. I was struck by early versions of "6th Avenue Heartache" and "Angel on My Bike"-both of which would later appear on the Wallflowers' breakout record, Bringing Down the Horse (1996)-and asked him to lunch. We never worked together, but became, and have remained, close friends, even as I left the music business to become a filmmaker and as he went on to enjoy enormous success with the group. The two of us sat down recently at a Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles to talk about his new album, Seeing Things (Columbia)-at the age of 38, his first record as a solo artist-and why being a songwriter means so much to him.

BRIAN KOPPELMAN: What struck me when we first met is that even as a young man, you had a seriousness of purpose about the craft of writing songs.

JAKOB DYLAN: I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively-and there were a lot of choices-writing songs was king.

BK: I remember when we would talk about other musicians. It's like you viewed being a musician as a calling really, where you have to apply not just talent, but rigor and discipline, to figure it out. Do you think you've always had a disciplined approach to making music yourself?

JD: Yeah. I mean, I've always had this disciplined approach to it. You have to have a work ethic and you have to be educated in what you're doing. You have to take it seriously. It doesn't mean that everything you do has to be serious. But you've got to have the tools. There are certainly a lot of people-and I won't name names-who are getting by simply on expression. And I guess that's valuable in some sense. But songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.

BK: In that context, it's interesting how often you use farming imagery, workingman imagery, in your songs. On Seeing Things, you sing from the perspective of a farmer in "All Day and All Night." In "Mourning Train," a song on Breach [2000], the singer is a regular guy who's grown up doing a regular kind of work-

JD: You don't think of me as a regular guy?

BK: I think you're a regular guy, but you're not a migrant farmworker.

JD: I come from farmland-well, not in the traditional sense of soil and carrots.

BK: Yeah, you haven't been working the farm and waiting for the custom cutter to come.

JD: I toil. [laughs]

BK: Here's what I think: You don't really want to say it, but you believe that the job of the songwriter is not that different from the job of the guy out there on the farm, in that if you're doing it right, you're putting your back into it.

JD: I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don't overintellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it's something you do if you put the work in.

BK: There's this idea in some of your songs-even the ones like "Invisible City" [on Bringing Down the Horse] from before you were famous-of being misperceived as somebody who looks right for the part and who, as the son of Bob Dylan, has the lineage and therefore has had some sort of an easy road. It's annoying to you, right?

JD: Right.

BK: Do you think that your particular work ethic is, in part, a reaction to the way you initially worried about being perceived?

JD: Maybe part of it is reactionary. Maybe that allows me the freedom to keep moving and going forward.

BK: Aren't you sort of in uncharted territory? There have been other kids of musical icons, like Julian Lennon, who have had hit records, and others, like Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainwright, who have careers. But it's very easy when you're in that position to kind of get swallowed up by the burden of expectations. And you're still out there battling your own success, your father's success, the burden of history, and an enormous legacy. Do you feel like there's anyone else out there in your position?