There are myriad aspects of Bob Dylan’s work, life, and creative process that have long fascinated me. The first is the storied post-motorcycle accident hiatus he took to live a relatively normal life in bucolic Woodstock, New York. During that period, he lived a small-town life with his family and created the first bootleg recording songs in the basement of Big Pink with members of the Band. The Great White Wonder, later The Basement Tapes, are some of Dylan’s most interesting covers and compositions, drawing from and reconnecting him with American roots music. The second is Dylan’s creative process of taking fragments of human artifacts and weaving them into original works that echo cultural history while also speaking to contemporary concerns. In this way, Dylan’s work collapses time. It is both timeless and of the period in which he created it. In this episode, renowned scholar, writer, and editor, Anne Margaret Daniel and I talk about her impressive body of work, living in Woodstock among friends and neighbors who also knew Dylan, and, of course, Dylan’s work and process. What an incredibly gratifying conversation.
Bio:
Anne Margaret Daniel is writer, editor, and longtime professor at the New School and Bard College whose work on literature, music, and culture has appeared for three decades in venues such as The New York Times, Hot Press, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement. Daniel holds degrees from Harvard, Georgetown, Princeton, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia. A leading scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and American Modernism, Daniel delivered the keynote at Princeton’s 1996 Fitzgerald Centenary Conference. She also writes frequently about music, including teaching the first NYU course on Bob Dylan’s combined arts and letters in 2017. Her editorial work includes Beauty’s Hour (2015), I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories (2017), The Great Gatsby (Norton Library, 2022), Tales of the Jazz Age (Oxford, 2023), and The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script (Cambridge, 2024). She is currently writing a novel set in Los Angeles’s film and music worlds, a book of essays on Bob Dylan, and co-editing Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s selected letters. Daniel lives in the Catskills with her husband, four beloved dogs, and a rotating cast of foster pups. (Source: https://www.annemargaretdaniel.com/about)
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