Thin Wild Mercury Sound

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Dylan talking about his ideal sound.

'It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.

Was that wild mercury sound in “I Want You”?
Yeah, it was in “I Want You.” It was in a lot of that stuff. It was in the album before that, too.

“Highway 61 Revisited”?
Yeah. Also in “Bringing It All Back Home.” That’s the sound I’ve always heard. . . .

The period when you came out with “Highway 61” must have been exciting.
Those were exciting times. We were doing it before anybody knew we would—or could. We didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be. Nobody thought of it as folk-rock at the time. There were some people involved in it like The Byrds, and I remember Sonny and Cher and the Turtles and the early Rascals. It began coming out on the radio. I mean, I had a couple of hits in a row. That was the most I ever had in a row—two. The top ten was filled with that kind of sound—the Beatles, too—and it was exciting, those days were exciting. It was the sound of the streets. It still is. I symbolically hear that sound wherever I am.

You hear the sound of the street?
That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartment buildings and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It’s all—it’s all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.

You mean if a jackhammer were—
Yeah, no jackhammer sounds, no airplane sounds. All pretty natural sounds. It’s water, you know water trickling down a brook. It’s light flowing through the . . .

Late-afternoon light?
No, it’s usually the crack of dawn. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn.

The “jingle jangle morning”?
Right.'

The "thin wild mercury sound" has been quoted extensively when discussing the sound of Dylan's music, but that longer reflection with the "sound of bells and distant railroad trains" is quite beautiful.

Modern Times, Dylan's latest record of new material, will be released on Tuesday.