Leonard Cohen was not a man easily impressed by other songwriters. He was too precise in his own craft — too aware of how much work a great line required, how many revisions stood behind a lyric that appeared effortless — to offer admiration casually. He wrote Hallelujah across eighty drafts over years. He reportedly filled notebooks with discarded verses for songs that the public eventually heard as seamless. He understood the gap between what a song appeared to be and what it had cost.
So when Cohen spoke about Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind with genuine awe — specifically about the fact that Dylan wrote it in approximately twenty minutes, reportedly on a napkin in a Greenwich Village cafe — he did so with the specific quality of admiration that contains within it a trace of bewilderment. He told an interviewer that he had spent years trying to understand how a song that simple, that complete, that resonant could have arrived so quickly. His conclusion was that it couldn’t be explained by craft or practice. It was something else.
Blowin’ in the Wind was written in 1962, when Dylan was 21 years old and had been performing professionally for approximately one year. It is structured as a series of rhetorical questions — how many roads, how many seas, how many times — that deliberately refuse to provide answers. The wind blows. The answer is there but unreachable, present but formless. It is a song about the limits of language at the exact moment when the civil rights movement needed a song that acknowledged those limits while still demanding change.
Dylan performed it publicly for the first time at Gerde’s Folk City in New York. The audience response was immediate and overwhelming. Peter, Paul and Mary recorded it and took it to number two on the charts before Dylan’s own version was widely distributed. It became one of the defining songs of the 1960s, performed at the March on Washington, covered by hundreds of artists, cited by Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle as a piece of music that captured the moral weight of the movement in a way that political language could not.
Cohen’s point — the one he kept returning to in interviews about Dylan — was not simply that Dylan wrote a great song quickly. His point was that the quickness was somehow part of the greatness. That a song about the impossibility of easy answers arrived without the labor that should have been required. That Dylan had somehow bypassed the process.
Dylan himself has been characteristically opaque about it. He has said in interviews that he doesn’t know where his early songs came from — that they arrived and he wrote them down and he has spent sixty years being asked to explain something he experienced as reception rather than composition. Whether that is mysticism or performance or simple honesty is impossible to determine from the outside. Cohen took it as honesty, and Cohen was a careful reader of other people.
What is certain is that Blowin’ in the Wind at 21, in twenty minutes, is still the thing against which everything else Dylan wrote is measured. That is either the most inspiring fact in songwriting history or the most discouraging one, depending on which side of it you are sitting on.