In a 1991 interview for the book Songwriters on Songwriting, Bob Dylan made a controversial statement: “The world don’t need any more songs,” he said. “If nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares.”
Of course, this was Dylan being typically ornery and unpredictable. After all, since 1991 he has released 13 albums and hundreds of songs, so he hardly closed up shop. And today’s Taylor Swift and Beyoncé fans waiting for the next album to drop would beg to differ about the power of brand-new music. But sometimes I wonder what Dylan would say now, with new AI music generators about to add a seemingly infinite number of songs to the music universe—including songs with voices that sound eerily similar to Dylan himself.
