Sometimes The Silence Can Feel Like Thunder...

I would like this opportunity to thank Bob Dylan for something very special.

I have been playing the guitar, in my own artless and impassioned but somewhat unskilled fashion, for well over half my lifetime. I have been singing along - sometimes flat, sometimes in tune, always happy - since I was a child and able to speak. But until Dylan gave me the gift of silence, I had never truly understood the power of sound.

Because silence is tangible. The pause can indeed be pregnant - heavy and full with the promise of a new birth of ideas and feelings. I also have a great respect and affection for the music of Paul Simon, but always thought The Sound of Silence was simply a clever rhetoric. Intellectually I knew what he meant, but never felt it in my soul until Bob Dylan came into my life, like a patient kindergarten teacher, and explained it to me carefully.

If you are wondering what I mean, I will give a few examples (although to run through the catalogue of songs and quote from each would be tiresome after a while - I will just highlight two or three).

Firstly, consider the staccato phrasing on The Man in the Long Black Coat. Each line broken and whispered so that the anticipation builds in an atmospheric way that makes the breaks and pauses as important as the lyrics themselves.

Then there is the beautiful moment in Highlands (maybe this is because I am English!) when a delicious pun is expertly worked by a silence:

'Insanity is smashing [pause]
up against my soul
You can say I was on anything [pause]
but a roll'

The thought of insanity being 'smashing' (in the UK sense of being fun and pleasant) enters my head for that split second before the full meaning of the continued line takes grip. Then there is the inference of drugs or medication by the second pause... again, this might be unintentional and just the way my mind works!

My final example is my favourite. In The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar there is a great line with an amazing use of the pause:

'There's a wall between you [pause]
what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you've got the power to take it
Tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it'

The lyrics on bobdylan.com add the word 'and' in that pause, but on the recording he certainly does not sing that. He pauses. The silence becomes as physical and as insurmountable as the wall he talks of. In the frenzy of that fevered song, it is a stroke of masterful vocalization that sets Dylan apart. He is never obvious. Always subtle. But therein lies the intensity that obviousness is devoid of.

If you listen to Dylan's music, you will find countless examples of the same thing. Never sloppy. Always precise. Carefully measured.

There is a song by Nanci Griffith I enjoy playing on the guitar - Is This All There Is? - in which the final chorus is preceded by a pause. A silence that always terrified me. I was scared of that break more than I was of the inferiority of my own voice or the lack of skill I showed in self-taught guitar strumming. I used to add a chord there. Anything to fill that chasm. The addition sounded wrong, but was less formidable than the moment of empty nothingness.

However, now I have learnt the value of golden silence I no longer fear that moment. I embrace the quiet - that eye of the storm which sometimes has more to say than any word could express. In the Nanci Griffith song, it is a poignant moment. The silence expresses the void left by the loss of a loved one before the final burst - the outpouring of grief, anger and the feeling one has been cheated of the dreams you build at the start of a relationship.

This is true in life as well. There are moments when silence says more than words ever could. There is a time for quiet, for reflection, for listening and contemplation.

I always loved the quote from Macbeth which describes life as 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. Transferring this idea to music, using an understated pause correctly can speak volumes and can only really be achieved by the best vocalists and writers.

The realization might not have improved my own dubious musical abilities, but it has furthered my understanding of the process.

Thanks, Bob!