Jakob Dylan Talks Breach, Westerberg
October 27, 2000 -- Jakob Dylan says he's pleased with Breach and that taking six months off after touring his band's 6 million-seller, Bringing Down the Horse, gave him the respite he needed to create again.
"I tried to do some writing when I'd gotten home from touring and didn't really feel like I'd had the right ideas yet," he says. The first song that he finally liked came in the form of "I Was Delivered." "I just wrote that song about not knowing what the hell I wanted to do," he says. "That's kind of what the song is about: a journey of trying to figure out what your point is and why you started doing this to begin with. Getting through the song somehow made things more clear."
The other songs quickly followed, though Dylan says he's a bit irked that critics picked up on some autobiographical details in "Hand Me Down" and projected their ideas of what the album is about to the other songs.
"I really don't confirm or deny, but they're being confused by one song and expressing the whole record to be that way. If they spent much time listening to everything else on the record, I don't think they'd make that connection so easily."
With Dylan's writing style, it's not surprising that he might find interesting parallels between his own career and that of a certain legendary Minnesota-born songwriter.
Paul Westerberg, of course.
Dylan points to the Minneapolis native and former leader of the Replacements as a prime influence on his own songwriting. He has a kinship with Westerberg, he says, and feels both of them are reluctant songwriters, doing it because they have to, not that they want to.
"I do find him to be one of the better songwriters America has ever offered," Dylan says. "I listen to all his stuff. I've always been a huge fan of Paul Westerberg.
"I really admired and was interested in the fact that he seemed to be this reckless character in this somewhat punk-pop group," says Dylan. "He had this attitude, then somewhere, these songs started creeping through, songs like 'Sixteen Blue,' 'Androgynous,' 'Unsatisfied,' and 'Answering Machine.' You started to realize he had this undeniable gift for writing that the average guy in these kinds of groups could never touch on. He seemed to resist it for a long time, also, but he obviously was into something he couldn't deny.
"To me, Paul Westerberg sounded like he never wanted to be a songwriter. He just wanted to be engulfed in this rock and roll outfit and make a lot of noise, play songs by the MC5 or something. Then one day it just dawned on him that he had this way of writing things that maybe he did or didn't want to do."
Dylan says he felt the same way — drawn to write songs, but resisting it. The resistance, he said, wasn't because of the fear in following in his father's footsteps, but because he had a different view of himself.
"I wanted to be a guitar player, but I wasn't getting good enough," he says. "I was aware of that. I didn't want to be a songwriter, not for any particular background issue as much as I didn't want to be anybody's focus. But I always had songs going around in my head. No matter what else I did, writing songs [was] always around me, always interesting."
He finds himself chagrined that Westerberg has been dropped from his record label and has been missing in action for going on two years now, while Westerberg-wannabe's get rich.
"People have taken advantage of him. I'm sure it must be very painful to him to watch these groups that are far inferior to him being very successful doing a very watered-down, B-version of what he started. But there's always guys like that. America particularly seems to need those people, whether it's him or Alex Chilton. The point is you hope they persevere and keep making good records for the people who do want to hear them. A lot of us need those good writers."