I’m sitting on a plane, thousands of miles above the world, my son sleeping in a car seat strapped into an airplane seat sitting on one side of me, my wife reading in the seat next to me. “A Hard Rain Is A-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan is playing in my ears, and I’ve just finished reading Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One. Mostly, I’m awed by his sense of Greenwich Village, 1961 – written as if he knew then that there was greatness, or at least great times, just ahead of him. What I was also struck by was how much he wanted to retreat from that greatness once he had kids – that the fame kept him from being what he most wanted to be – a family man. What is equally striking was that twenty years later, as he sat in a New Orleans recording studio, trying to make an album with Daniel Lanois, he found that he missed the greatness that he let slip by.

And now I sit here, listening to that greatness, thinking that we’re still in that hard rain, that we still need singers and songwriters who can encapsulate a moment for its eternal truth – for all that is right and wrong in the world in a moment and sing about it. I am sure that no one can live with the label “Prophet” before they are destroyed by it, and on some level, I suppose that Dylan lived with that term, ran from it, and came through it on the other side as – as he puts it – a “Legend” or an “Icon” but most importantly, he came through it alive and sane. We have a habit of destroying our prophets – one could argue that that’s a tradition that goes back to the legends of Moses and probably more accurately Jesus. We Westerners have never been much for the folks who could look at us – look into us – and tell us something that we didn’t want to or couldn’t see. We either killed them with our love or our hate – and sometimes with a bit of both. Either way, it’s a hell of a cross to bear, and good for Bob Dylan, I suppose, for deciding “to hell with it all” and writing either personal or inscrutable or metaphorical songs.

Of course, that’s a funny thing to hear coming from me, as I’ve been known to lament that we needed him from time to time. The world is rather short on truth-tellers these days. We’ve gotten really good at spin, but we’ve lost something rather precious in the process. Although, that too is an interesting thing for me to call for – after all, don’t I talk about “The Good” over “The True?” Perhaps… but I guess I don’t hear enough people calling for the Good either.

I’m trying to think of the last song I’ve heard that spoke to me as if it was telling me a truth that I had felt but could never name. One of those songs, like “A Hard Rain” or “Blowin’ In The Wind” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that made the world different after hearing them. I remember the first time I really listened to Dylan – I remember being a teenager and hearing “Come senators, congressmen, please heed my call” and feeling like the revolution was coming, or driving in my father’s car, listening to “Tambourine Man” and wanting to go on that trip with him. I remember listening and being mesmerized. And some days, those songs can still conjure up that feeling of awe and wonder.

Can music change the world? Should we be angry with Bob Dylan for backing away from that question? I don’t know and I don’t think so. I think he tried to sing and see the world he saw. I think, in the end, he did change the world, although the problem with change is that the agent of change has to give up control of the changes after a while. Maybe Dylan didn’t like the changes he saw. Maybe he realized that a song can be an agent for change, but so can a war like Vietnam. Maybe he just was a flawed human being like the rest of us. And maybe he looks back now on what was and what could have been. Maybe he wonders if Woody Guthrie would have been proud of Dylan’s legacy, whatever it may be. But in the end, his music is still listened to, and he’s still out there, writing songs that may or may not change the world.