Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, Sensing Time “Running Away”)

“Shadows are falling and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep, time is running away.”--Bob Dylan, “Not Dark Yet,” from his Time Out of Mind CD (1997)

He’s always been hard-headed about mortality (see “I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke,” from the Blood on the Tracks tune “Buckets of Tears”). But on Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan displayed a bone-deep sense of his own mortality.

Contrary to popular belief, the whole album had been written before Dylan was treated at the hospital in May 1997 for histoplasmosis, a fungal infection that can lead to pneumonia in rare, untreated cases. No matter: like T.S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Dylan had “seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/And in short, I was afraid.”

Today, Dylan turns 70. Given the rock ‘n’ life and the constant grind of his never-ending tour (one that's badly frayed his voice) since the Eighties, there’s an element of luck in his survival, but also, maybe, an act of defiance against those who’ve counted him out over the years.

After all, as Alex Ross noted in a New Yorker summary of his life to date in 1999, “The Wanderer”: “If you look through what has been written about Bob Dylan in the past 30-odd years, you notice a desire for him to die off, so that his younger self can assume its mythic place.”
Never mind: focus on the songs--nearly 1,000 of them, in the course of his five-decade career. I think you’ll see they richly merit the tribute Bruce Springsteen paid his elder at the 1988 induction ceremony at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame:

“He was a revolutionary, man, the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. And he showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever.”