Read Imagine: How Creativity Works for Free Online

answers. This was the thrilling discovery that saved Dylan’s career: he could write vivid lines filled with possibility without knowing exactly what those possibilities were. He didn’t need to know. He just needed to trust the ghost.
    This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. One had to sing of injustice or a broken heart, chant wordy lines over a bare-bones melody. There could be an acoustic guitar and a harmonica but not much else.
    The second way was essentially the opposite. Instead of wallowing in melancholy and complexity, one could imitate those cynical geniuses on Tin Pan Alley and compose an irresistible jin-gle full of major chords. Take, for instance, this number-one Bill-board single from 1965, “I Can’t Help Myself,” made famous by the Four Tops:
    Sugar pie, honeybunch
    You know that I love you
    These lyrics have a deliberate clarity. As soon as the first couplet is heard, the listener knows exactly what kind of song it will be. (In this sense, it’s not so different from those somber folk songs.) Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn’t stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that “vomitific” writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realized that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn’t insist on making sense, that existed outside the categories of FM radio. He would later say that this was his first “completely free song . . . the one that opened it up for me.” But what did it open up? In retrospect, we can see that the composition — it would become the debut single on Highway 61 Revisited — allowed Dylan to fully express, for the first time, the diversity of his influences. Listening to these ambiguous lyrics, we can hear his mental blender at work as he effortlessly mixes together scraps of Arthur Rimbaud, Fellini, Bertolt Brecht, and Robert Johnson. There’s some Delta blues and “La Bamba” but also plenty of Beat poetry, Ledbetter, and the Beatles. The song is modernist and premodern, avant-garde and country-western.
    What Dylan did — and this is why he’s Bob Dylan — was find the strange thread connecting those disparate voices. During those frantic first minutes of writing, his right hemisphere found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of in-fluences, drawing them together into a catchy song. He didn’t yet know what he was doing — the ghost was still in control — but he felt the excitement of an insight, the subliminal thrill of something new. (“I don’t think a song like ‘Rolling Stone’ could have been done any other way,” Dylan insisted. “You can’t sit down and write that consciously . . . What are you gonna do, chart it out?”) When Dylan gets to the chorus — and he knows this is the chorus as soon as he commits it to paper — the visceral power of the song becomes obvious:
    How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
    The following week, on June 15, 1965, Dylan brought his sheaf of papers into the cramped space of Studio A at Columbia Records in New York City. After just four takes — the musicians were only beginning to learn their parts — “Like a Rolling Stone” was cut on acetate. Those six minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock ’n’ roll. Bruce Springsteen would later describe the experience of hearing the single on AM radio as one of the most important moments of his life. Even John Lennon was in awe of the achievement.
    The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process. These radical breakthroughs are so valuable that we’ve invented traditions and rituals that increase the probability of an epiphany, making us more likely to hear those remote associations coming from the