How Bob Dylan inspired a Riverdale musician's unique take on music and meaning in new book

On May 13, 2011, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan posted a brief note with an unusual proposition on his official website, BobDylan.com.

“Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future,” he wrote. “So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”

More than a decade later, one reader decided to take him up on the offer.

Singer-songwriter Kevin Kane has spent decades listening to Dylan, drawn to the cultural icon’s unconventional sound and offbeat lyrics — lines like “The sun isn’t yellow, it’s chicken,” from the 1965 song “Tombstone Blues.” Now 70, the longtime Riverdale resident is less interested in what the songs say than in what they leave behind.

In his first book, “Seeking Mirth & Beauty: Musings on How Things Come to Be,” Kane does not retell Dylan’s life or try to decode his lyrics. Instead, he focuses on the experience of hearing the music — why some songs stay with people, and why others don’t.

“I point out very emphatically that the book is not about him at all,” Kane told The Press. “People try so hard to explain what he means, and it dawned on me a long time ago that his songs don’t mean anything any more than Jackson Pollock means something. Or Picasso putting the nose on the side of the face, it doesn’t mean anything, except that when he does it, it’s really good.”

The book grew slowly. Kane began writing during the pandemic, but the ideas had been building for years in notes and reflections.

“It became enough and comprehensive enough that it was all hanging together,” he explained.. “I thought, ‘I want to organize my thoughts and see what I actually think about all this.’”

Kane said the way he listens to music comes from how he grew up. He was one of nine children in a busy household in Connecticut, where quiet was hard to find.

“I just wanted to live alone so bad,” he reflected. “I loved my brothers and sisters, but I just wanted to be left alone and have some privacy.”

It was there that he first heard Dylan. Late one night, lying in a room he shared with five brothers, he listened to a small transistor radio, trying not to wake anyone.

“It was the most bizarre, non-linear, unlike any song that I’d ever heard in my life,” Kane added. “I would say it changed my life.”

What stayed with him was not a clear meaning, but a feeling. He kept returning to the same songs, noticing how they changed depending on when he heard them.

That habit carried into his adult life. After moving to New York City in 1989, Kane settled in Riverdale in 1996 with his wife and two daughters. Meanwhile, he continued to write and record music.

“I have made my living by being frugal, and I’m really good at it,” he said.

Kane worked a mix of jobs that allowed him to keep creating in his free time. For more than a decade, he also worked at the Hebrew Home, helping care for its art collection. Being around paintings every day changed how he thought about music.

In the book, Kane compares Dylan’s work to abstract painting, writing that the songs are less like stories and more like something you experience. People don’t always try to explain a painting, he noted. They look at it, spend time with it and take something from it. He began to think songs could work the same way.

“[Dylan] is as much an abstract-expressionist artist as he is a traditional songwriter,” he said. “His songs are more like objects of art. He’s not telling you about something. He creates something that you can kind of walk around.”

Kane explained that not everything needs to matter for it to be enjoyed , an idea that became more important to him over time.

“I want people to listen differently, to him and to other songs and to see works of art differently,” he said. “That they don’t mean something, that they just are something.”

That view puts him somewhat at odds with how Dylan is often discussed. Many listeners try to interpret the lyrics and find clear meaning. Kane understands that, but sees it as only one way of listening.

“There’s these websites that Dylan fans go crazy with and they just keep on deciding what this song means,” he said. “And the lines they talk about are the most bizarre, weird lines, there is no sense in trying. That doesn’t mean anything at all. But it’s a great song.”

After finishing the manuscript, Kane sent it out not expecting it to be published. It was eventually picked up by a small Wisconsin-based press, Genius Book Publishing, and released March 5.

“It’s not Simon and Schuster, and I’m not Stephen King, but people will read it, and that’s the satisfaction,” he said.

For Kane, the book is less about explaining Dylan than about holding onto the feeling he had as a teenager —- hearing something he couldn’t quite make sense of but couldn’t forget.

He said that feeling hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s what has kept him listening.

“I’m really glad that I wrote it,” he said. “And I’m gonna continue to seek mirth and beauty.”