Bob Dylan, Judy Collins

As a teenager I was a dedicated Bob Dylan fan; I loved his early, gently poetic folk, I loved his angry, psychedelic stream-of-consciousness rock period, I loved his temporary country guise, I loved his return to folk with Blood on the Tracks and his exotic Desire. I loved the anger in the Christian albums, and I loved his second phase as a songwriter who spits out Americana gems, from Oh Mercy to Modern Times. But part of me has tended towards the long, slow, wry Leonard Cohen, who, like Bryan Ferry, has adapted his lyrical genius into definite and decadent styles. Perhaps even more than these two masters, though, I have adored the majestic Judy Collins, who encompasses both songwriters while including the disparate genius that emanates from Jacques Brel, Stephen Sondheim, and Kurt Weill, not to mention Joni Mitchell, more open to experimentation than either Dylan or Cohen.

There is something almost unspeakably touching about the string-laden interpretations of great songs that Collins excels at, and in her obvious love for the material she works with. When I was young I considered Collins a very minor musician, perhaps even a singer who didn't "get" Dylan the way I "got" him. I've long since come to recognize this same unpleasant, fundamental, and uneducated approach to Dylan in other Dylan fans -- a prime example would be with Bryan Ferry's recent Dylanesque, a hit-or-miss collection of Dylan songs that have some moments which are spectacular and some of which are blase, which received mostly vitriol from Dylan aficionados. But it's the offhandedness with which Ferry interprets Dylan that is seemingly misinterpreted as being shallow; this is the same feeling I had with Collins when I was young. All I could see was the original, and compared to it, the interpretation seemed merely thin. It took years before I realized that what I considered minor, thin, and pale in comparison to the original was actually much more subtle and gentle -- something so rare and delicate that it could only be misinterpreted.

It's this delicateness that leads to many female singers being marginalized -- k.d. lang and Nanci Griffith may be the two most prominent, two singers working on the level of Billie Holiday. (I would compare them to Dolly Parton if Parton herself wasn't so marginalized.) For women who don't perform with the fervor of Nina Simone or the hard-edged world-weariness of Lucinda Williams, there is little place for recognition. Music criticism is a boy's game, and the boys like women who either act like men or who occupy an extreme version of girliness -- this would explain why middle-aged hipster men can appreciate Astrud Gilberto or Francoise Hardy, but when faced with Collins will turn away.