Bob Dylan is at the top of my influences list and has been for as long as I have been seriously writing songs. Not because his voice is technically impressive, it is famously not, but because he demonstrated that the voice does not have to be the instrument. The words can be the instrument. The conviction can be the instrument. The willingness to say something true without softening it for an easier reception can be the instrument.

I am Tony Oso, a rock and alternative artist from Melbourne, Florida. I write, record, and produce my own music and the way I think about songwriting was shaped significantly by time spent with Dylan's catalog. Here are the songs that did the most work on me and what I actually took from each one.

Like a Rolling Stone (1965)

This is where Dylan essentially restarted his career and redefined what a rock song could be in the same moment. Six minutes long, openly contemptuous in its emotional register, built around an organ riff and a rhythm section that drives forward without mercy. The first time I heard it properly, not as background music but actually listened to it, what struck me was the unapologetic quality of the delivery. Dylan is not trying to make you comfortable with what he is saying. He is not softening the edges for broader appeal. The vulnerability and the confrontation are happening in the same song and neither one undercuts the other.

That combination is something I think about in my own writing. The instinct to make a song more accessible by making it less direct is real and it usually produces worse songs. Like a Rolling Stone taught me that the most confrontational songs can also be the most emotionally resonant ones.

Blowin' in the Wind (1963)

Three chords and a series of questions that have no comfortable answers. That is the whole song. Dylan turned that structural simplicity into one of the most enduring anthems in American music and the lesson is about what simplicity in service of a genuine question can accomplish.

I return to this song specifically when I am overcomplicating something. When a lyric is getting too dense or a structure is getting too elaborate, Blowin' in the Wind is a reminder that the question itself can carry the song if the question is real enough. The song does not answer anything. That is the point. The power is in the refusal to pretend that easy answers exist.

This connects to something I wrote about in my post on what is alternative rock, specifically the tradition of songwriting that treats emotional honesty as more important than emotional resolution. Dylan's early folk work is the foundation that tradition is built on.

Tangled Up in Blue (1975)

This is the Dylan song I have studied most carefully as a songwriter. From Blood on the Tracks, which is one of the most emotionally direct albums in rock history despite being wrapped in narrative complexity, Tangled Up in Blue jumps through time and perspective in ways that initially feel disorienting and eventually feel completely inevitable.

The song does not follow a linear narrative. It moves through memory the way memory actually works, nonchronologically, with the emotional truth of each moment mattering more than temporal sequence. Dylan shifts point of view across verses in ways that should be confusing and somehow are not because the feeling underneath is consistent throughout.

I took from this song permission to trust nonlinear structure when the material calls for it. Songs do not have to follow the order that the experience happened in. They have to follow the order that makes the experience most true. Those are different things and Tangled Up in Blue was the first song that showed me the distinction clearly.

The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)

This song made me understand that political and social content in a song does not require anger to be effective. The Times They Are A-Changin' is calm. It is almost gentle in its delivery. The warning it contains is delivered without the aggression that most protest music uses to make its point, and the result is something more unsettling than anger would have produced. It does not feel like a performance of conviction. It feels like a statement of fact.

As someone who writes music partly to process the world around me, the way I think about politically adjacent content in songs was shaped by this one. My song Mistakes, which deals with watching certain patterns repeat in society and in personal life, comes from the same instinct as The Times They Are A-Changin': that the observation itself is the point, not the accompanying emotional display.

Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)

This is the Dylan song I listen to specifically when I feel creatively stuck. The lyrics are surreal and deliberately unresolved, painting images that suggest rather than conclude. The freedom in the writing, the willingness to follow an image wherever it goes without forcing it into a conventional narrative shape, is what I come back to it for.

There is a tendency in songwriting to want to arrive somewhere. To have the song mean something specific and communicable. Mr. Tambourine Man does not do that and it works because the feeling the images produce is more precise than any explicit statement could have been. Sometimes the right instinct is to trust the image and get out of the way.

This connects to something I am still working on in my own writing. The tension between wanting to say something specific and wanting to evoke something that resists being said specifically. Dylan navigated that tension better than almost anyone in American songwriting history.

What He Actually Proved

Dylan's voice is not technically impressive. It is nasal, idiosyncratic, and was widely mocked even at the height of his commercial success. What it has is absolute conviction in what it is delivering. That conviction is what makes even the most challenging Dylan performances compelling rather than simply strange.

The lesson I carry from that is one I have written about in different contexts across several posts on this site: that authenticity and emotional honesty produce something that technical proficiency alone cannot. The voice does not have to be the most refined thing in the room. It has to be the most honest thing in the room.

For what it is worth: when I started performing I had significant doubts about my own voice. A naturally deep voice that does not do what conventional rock singing tends to do. Dylan was part of what helped me understand that those doubts were beside the point. What matters is whether you mean it. You can hear it in his records. If you mean it, that travels.

You can hear how these influences show up in practice at tonyosomusic.com/music. Mistakes and Tears are probably the closest points of contact with what Dylan taught me about emotional directness and nonlinear narrative respectively. For the broader folk rock tradition that Dylan helped create, my post on folk rock groups covers where his influence traveled after he went electric.