"Sitting in a house with her guitar, in a huddle with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell shows the guys chords to a new song called “Coyote,” just before diving into it, in a vivid moment in “Rolling Thunder Revue.” It’s one sustained shot, handheld, and yet it feels like watching something great being born. The richness of Mitchell’s road-hardened writing weaves with her shimmering voice and guitar. Watching Dylan’s chagrined face, listening to, watching Joni, took us back to a kindred moment in the late, great D.A. Pennebaker’s classic “Don’t Look Back,” as Dylan sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” while Donovan takes it in. But this time Dylan is the humbled one."

"Sitting in a house with her guitar, in a huddle with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell shows the guys chords to a new song called “Coyote,” just before diving into it, in a vivid moment in “Rolling Thunder Revue.” It’s one sustained shot, handheld, and yet it feels like watching something great being born. The richness of Mitchell’s road-hardened writing weaves with her shimmering voice and guitar. Watching Dylan’s chagrined face, listening to, watching Joni, took us back to a kindred moment in the late, great D.A. Pennebaker’s classic “Don’t Look Back,” as Dylan sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” while Donovan takes it in. But this time Dylan is the humbled one."

"OK, maybe I’m cheating here. I know this is off Blood On The Tracks, but it’s my all-time favourite song. It’s one of those songs where the lyrics are ambiguous you can actually write the song yourself. That’s a lot of fun – it’s like Dylan fooling around with the listener, playing on the way he or she interprets the lyrics. “It’s very hard to take individual songs off Blood On the Tracks, because itworks so well as an entire album. I used to think ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ was a more powerful song than ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ but, over the years I’ve kinda realized ‘Tangled…’ has the edge, just for the fun you can have with it."

"Downtown Train was the first song that I remember hearing by Tom Waits. It’s a great song. It also said everything that I wanted to say. I was 17 years old and I realised that I was never going to be a great singer because I had this weird voice, so I started looking at all the guys who had weird voices: Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Tom Waits. I aligned myself with those guys and said, ‘OK, let me see what they’re doing. What can I do to add to it?’ Tom Waits really put the icing on the cake for me because he was all about the lyrics and the delivery – nothing else mattered. He showed me that if you mean it enough then you could do anything you want. I loved his hobo dress sense as well. He looked like all the things that I was doing at the time because I was working on cars and I would wear the jeans and the boots and the blue shirt. We’d wipe our hands on the shirts because they were thick and you could wash them and the grease would come out; we’d wear the jeans so when you were leaning on the floor your knees wouldn’t rip; and we’d wear the boots so if you dropped the carburettor it wouldn’t break your toes. So there was a purpose for everything, and that’s why I sought of had a connection with these guys. I felt like Tom Waits was my friend, and I went down the rabbit hole after discovering him."