Daryl Hall discarded lyrics Bob Dylan wrote for him
Daryl Hall was close to writing a song with Bob Dylan, for his solo album, but in the end he decided to say “it can’t be done”.
The Hall & Oates singer was working on songs for his 1986 solo album “Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine” and realized that one of the songs, “Dreamtime“, he sounded very similar to mid-60s Dylan”, “It reminded me a lot of “Blonde on Blonde””, as he stated in an interview shortly after the album’s release.
His collaborator and producer, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, suggested contacting Dylan to see if he was interested in writing lyrics. “He sent me these crazy texts,” Hall recalled during a new conversation for the “Naked Lunch” podcast, hosted by Phil Rosenthal and David Wild. “Bob gave me this tape of him singing ‘Dreamtime’ with his lyrics.”
The lyrics, according to Hall, were good. However, as he recalled at the time of the album’s initial release, “they weren’t what I wanted to sing about, so I discarded them. But I kept the line ‘movie star eyes’.” Hall said Dylan didn’t hold a grudge, but in hindsight he ended up having some regrets himself.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he told Rosenthal and Wild. “I could have said, ‘Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll sing those words.’ But I didn’t.” Even without Dylan’s participation, Hall achieved a Top 5 hit when “Dreamtime” was released as the first single from the album “Three Hearts,” and was overall rewarded by the final results. “When I started working on the record, I knew what I didn’t want to do,” he said at the time. “I didn’t want this album to be a continuation of Hall & Oates.”
After the success of this summer’s tour with Elvis Costello78 year old Daryl Hall (born Daryl Franklin Hohl) will return live in autumn with his colleague from the 80s Howard Jones. As the singer-songwriter revealed in the Naked Lunch interview, this is an activity closer to the type of touring he wants to undertake in the future. “I did the Elvis show and it was a joint thing, but I feel like I don’t want to do those kinds of major tours anymore,” he explained. “I just want to do shorter tours that are basically a live version of what we do on the TV show “Live From Daryl’s House”. To do that, I need connections and the right mix of artists to get involved. Howard will do that with me and I have other people in mind like Todd Rundgren for example and I will continue to do it that way.”
“Live From Daryl’s House” is a program on a Web TV broadcast since 2007 during which the singer-songwriter hosts in his home studio colleagues (of different ages and artistic backgrounds) with whom he plays pieces from his own repertoire and that of the guest.
