Dylan's Museum
A Conversation with Nashville Musician Jonah Kraut
Nashville musician Jonah Kraut and I have been friends and intermittent collaborators for over 20 years. In light of recently co-writing a song titled “Lucy Gray” — that Jonah performed and submitted to NPR’s 2026 Tiny Desk Contest1 — we conversed by email about Dylan, Wordsworth, and many other things, including music as salvation.
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MB: A few months ago you posted on YouTube a performance you did at a funeral of “Fishin’ in the Dark” by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. You added this comment: “Upon personal reflection, it occurred to me that songs, and this one in particular, can take us to places that are in between, worlds unseen, to the incorporeal and the liminal, and help us to feel the dimensions of these places. Joyous, heartbreaking, and full of love.”2 What was it about that song and performance that led you to this realization? And am I right to infer from this comment a change or evolution in your view of songs?
JK: Not a change, maybe an evolution, definitely a deepening. But to try to answer your question, I think it’s the circumstance. In this case, the deceased “went out” to this song. It could have been “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” which would have had a different meaning. So being in this position where I’m learning songs for a funeral, this particular song now has a galaxy of meaning in its words. The ones I can remember off the top of my head are “it don’t matter if we sit forever and the fish don’t bite,” and “lying on our backs while counting the stars where the cool grass grows.” I don’t think they wrote it thinking about that, but something about how they put it together, the words being sung in a particular way that matches the music. And for me to transmit these seemingly innocuous words about running around nature on a summer night into a netherworld of the dying or not quite dead, where is this place? Maybe it’s the same place as Dylan’s museum in “Visions of Johanna,” infinity going on trial. But that’s where the song took me, and coming back to the earthly realm, you can apply this to any song, given the circumstances. We can breathe meaning into things depending on what kind of perspective we take.
Creativity builds on itself. Learning songs for a funeral was one thing, but this particular song in this setting tipped it into something deeper, and for that I’m very grateful. I would also say that because it was not a song I wrote, it was not my own music, I gained a broader perspective, much like I think our process for “Lucy Gray” was aided by this non-ownership I felt in approaching it.
MB: Tell me more about Dylan’s museum. I listened to “Visions of Johanna” a few times before sitting down to reply. I’d never paid much attention to the museum verse. The line after the one you mention is “voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while.” Salvation: I keep coming back to the reality of the funeral and mortality as the circumstances of the performance. I don’t want to overread your reference (if the song is the museum, then...), so I’ll just pose a version of the question animating this Depth Practice project: do you think you experienced the song differently in midlife (we’re the same age, right?) than you would have 20 years ago?
JK: I think yes with the salvation. But let me ask you, are there different types of salvation? I’m trying to scan other Dylan songs, and let’s say that the “eternity” in “Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” could link in with the infinity of the museum, but are these different types of salvation? Certainly different types of songs. Or maybe that’s just on the surface.
I don’t think I experienced the song that differently, but I do think there are layers of depth. Dylan’s notoriously changing musical approaches to his songs offers a template and rationale for seeking changes within a performance.
I do think it is a sort of game between the “fixed” things and the ever expanding changes.
MB: Yes. There’s the kind Dylan means on his record titled Saved. I was thinking more about the kind Jeff Tweedy sings about on “Sunken Treasure”:
Music is my savior
I was maimed by rock and roll
I was maimed by rock and roll
I was tamed by rock and roll
I got my name from rock and roll
With “Visions of Johanna” you have surfaced connections to the Lucy poems I hadn’t realized existed. “Strange fits” concerns a night playing tricks. But probably more interesting is that the ethereal and absent figures of Lucy and Johanna haunt Wordsworth and Dylan respectively in those songs. Do you remember when you first encountered Dylan’s music?
JK: Yes, “Sunken Treasure” has some wonderful dynamic playing by the drummer, Ken Coomer.
And yes, finding my own Dylan origin stories has been top of mind lately. I try to disassemble the amalgam and sort through the threads. One can’t un-know Dylan, despite his attempts at camouflage.
It was probably hearing our old bandmate Worth Wagers and his band The Moviegoers singing “My Back Pages” at a Schuba’s Hoot Night, a North Chicago hipster-themed indie pop hangout, maybe 1996 or 1997. Could have been Dylan vs Bowie that night. It was just the refrain (“I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”) that lodged itself in my mind. Once I found out it was Dylan I could connect with associations I’d already formed from looking at my parents’ record collection. I browsed the titles and the artwork.
It was a slow build. Once I got my drivers license I could play tapes and Bringing It All Back Home got in rotation. I specifically remember playing it for some of my music friends when I started learning jazz and having a feeling like I was hip because they were a year younger and I listened to Dylan. Did you feel cool when you discovered him?
Between my first and second year of college, a high school buddy and I audited a history of rock and roll summer school class at Northwestern University. The instructor encouraged us to write Dylan’s words down and we looked at “Like a Rolling Stone” and “As I Went Out One Morning.” I felt plumbed into the catacombs, but not yet an owner of feelings for him.
The summer after my first year at NEC I worked at a record store (Looney Tunes), interacting with a hardcore Dylanophile. Btw, he authoritatively listed his top three Dylan songs as “Blowin in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Visions of Johanna,” but maybe “Idiot Wind” was up there as well.
By 2nd year in college I was heavy into Another Side Of, which provided the full circle moment of digging “My Back Pages.”
What about you?
MB: I untangled this in an essay recently.3 The first Dylan album I owned -- so, the first I listened to and spent time with -- was Live 1966. I don’t remember anything about hearing Dylan before I got that album: simply put, that was my start. Live 1966 came out on October 13, 1998. I was in my first fall of college. I was really partial to the electric set over the solo acoustic side. I then went to see him and his band play at Hill Auditorium on November 5th, 2000. On the level of immediate experience, the show went over my head. What I do remember: the moment the stage lights came on, Dylan and the band hit their first chord (ie, no intro, no fiddling around or tuning up on stage, etc). It was all acoustic for several songs. Then the auditorium went dark for a minute. Lights back on and they all have their electrics. G. E. Smith comes out during the encore for a song or two. I was there, but I didn’t really know, understand, or appreciate what I was experiencing on the level of in-the-moment awareness.
I have a bootleg of this show thanks to a friend. I listen now and it’s staggeringly good. That band in that classic 1913 auditorium with its parabolic ceiling. The setlist included some rarities (”If Dogs Run Free”!) as well as some songs that I didn’t know at the time but would come to love in later years: “Cold Irons Bound,” “Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind,” “Simple Twist of Fate.”4
I think a lot about the timeline and can’t help but see meaning in it. I heard these songs in 2000 and very little registered. Within a few years I would find my way back to them -- all of them -- to listen, study, and play. Take “Country Pie,” for example. He played it that night. I wouldn’t know Nashville Skyline existed until a few years later (2003 or 04, when you introduced it to me). And then suddenly we are learning it and playing it all around Boston.
Do you recall what you learned (even if not in the moment but that maybe surfaced later when you started writing songs) when that prof had you write out those Dylan words that summer?
JK: It was presented in a way that was at least partially academic, but I think that was appealing to me. I felt meaning in Dylan’s words beyond what we heard from, say, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, although I felt something cosmic from them as well.
“If Dogs Run Free,” by the way, is a song I would much prefer to listen to live and be thinking about the album than listening to the album thinking about it live, for some reason.
I’m having a hard time finding a connection to my own entry point into writing words. Maybe I was never approaching music from a words first perspective until I was already knee deep into it that I just had to instinctually problem solve, rather than giving myself challenges. Nowadays the words are important from the perspective of the singer. The prosody of words in relation to the singer. Very different from your approach?
The concept of looking back on something is only relatively new. Music that existed before the turn of the 20th century was never heard more than once. So I think absolutely things change the more we look at it, while retaining some sense of a fixed constant.
MB: Right. I know you’re talking about the advent of recorded music, but I sometimes think about music pre-YouTube and post-YouTube -- not just for the fact that so much is at our fingertips but, at least for me, the richness of what is there. Stuff that’s obscure or out of print and not available on any of the streaming services; audience-recorded audio and video of live performances; so much Dylan; and then the comments sections. People are there. Up late at night, calling up songs that evoke deceased or estranged loved ones or a tough time in life that this song got them through -- and sharing that in the comments. I have been incredibly moved by comments I’ve come across in the past.
But regarding songwriting, I have always been learning and writing through imitation of what I like, what moves me. Can I figure out how this thing I like is put together. That’s almost always my starting point. “Lucy Gray” is the first time I tried to work with a literary text and come up with a song. I think I made a few different versions before I sent one to you. I remember an early version in a really folky 3/4. Might have been a bit precious. What did you hear in that one made you circle back and rework? And choose it for your Tiny Desk submission?
JK: I just think it’s experience. We recorded two albums with the Patrons back in the 00s. I did two records as co-producer with Ran Blake, and after moving to Nashville, three records under my own name, along with all my self-made recordings.
By 2023, when I recorded I, Tiresias, or This is the Story, I was more acutely aware of the whole process from beginning to end, and I think I was able to retain this notion of leaving certain things unfinished in order to draw out that in-the-moment feeling. I try to think of a thing’s awareness of itself, and musically I strive to capture those moments of self-awareness. That can look different if it’s putting words and music together or finding a group dynamic with session players, or some combination.
Whatever it was, you had started sending me songs in 2025, and I think Lucy was the second one I worked on. I really didn’t think about it too much, just found what worked for me. What stuck with me, there were several elements, but that first line really pops out and creates this downhill feeling. I could go on about what I think works, but hopefully I answered your question, at least partially.
MB: I guess I am curious to hear a little more. You mentioned “non-ownership” in your first response. Was there something in the fact that most of these words were Wordsworth’s and not mine or yours? I’ll let you conclude with anything else you want re. “Lucy Gray.”
JK: “Non-ownership” is a bit unclear. Initially, I didn’t know what was Wordsworth and what was Borushko. Instinctive about my own, albeit minimal, chord and (even more minimal) word changes from your version to mine, it was also eye-opening for me to dig into the poems to learn what was what. Perhaps it is fair to say, even if crudely, that the verses are mostly Wordsworth and the chorus is mostly Borushko. And it also occurs to me that the three of us are all co-inhabiting a point of view of this character in the song. The authorship of the sentiment of this character is simultaneously foreign and shared, all co-transmitting its expression to the listener. I’m hoping you can do a better job of elucidating this. But the effect, to me, feels of openness. The image I have is that of triboluminescent stones that glow when close together. We as artists possess certain skills individually, but in collaboration, maybe these skills combine into something more, could we say magical? Perhaps in this case, the distance between us, by time and space is actually a boon, magnifying that luminescence. But it is no different that being captured by any work of art, a sense of shared experience.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you might like these other recent essays in Depth Practice:
— Revisiting the Restaurant Scene in Dylan’s “Highlands”: A Note on Time Out of Mind
— On Adult Sadness: Midlife Notes on Reading David Foster Wallace on Tennis
— Beer and Poetry: Rereading a Poem by Housman
Please consider subscribing to Depth Practice for more essays and conversations:
More of Jonah’s music can be found here.
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