Why Did Steve Jobs Say No One Else Could Have Been Bob Dylan?

David Senra says Bob Dylan wrote Chronicles: Volume One himself, every word, with no editor. A blurb Senra reads says the memoir is less a life story than the story of a birth, when Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. Senra pairs that with a line he heard from an older Dylan: life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Senra then turns to Steve Jobs, who talked about Dylan from his twenties until he was dying. Senra counts about 15 mentions of Dylan in the Walter Isaacson biography. Jobs and Steve Wozniak tracked down underground Dylan recordings. Jobs collected printed Dylan lyrics and spent hours interpreting them. Jobs said he collected hundreds of hours of Dylan concerts and listened to them on headphones in bed. Near the end of his life, sitting with Isaacson and playing Dylan records, Jobs said no one else could have been Bob Dylan.

After Apple released the iTunes Store, Jobs had a two-hour conversation with Dylan. Dylan told him the songs just came through him, and that composing them was not the feeling. Jobs told Isaacson he learned from the Beatles and from Dylan to keep evolving, moving, and refining the work. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.