Bob Dylan says even “HE doesn’t know what everything ‘means’ in his songs” in Nobel Lecture

Stockholm, June 6: Music Icon Bob Dylan has delivered his Nobel Lecture to the Swedish Academy just in time to collect a 8 million Swedish krona ($1.2 million) reward.

Musician Dylan, who won the Nobel prize for literature October 2016 was required by laureates to give a lecture no later than June 10 to collect prize money.

‘If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means,’ he said in the speech posted on the Academy’s website.

The speech was posted online on Monday, and the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Sara Danius released a statement saying that “the Dylan adventure is coming to a close, and the speech is extraordinary.

In the 26-minute Nobel lecture published as an audio file, Dylan says ‘Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.‘
“The themes from those books [and others that impacted him] worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally,” he said. “I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.”

The 76-year-old musician, was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, even he did not attend the awards ceremony in Stockholm in December last year. Then US ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji read Dylan’s thank-you speech at the banquet.

Dylan is the first singer-songwriter to win the prestigious Nobel Literature Prize.