Word: truthful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Carabiniers - made in 1963 but just released in the U.S. - opens with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, the Ar gentine poet and novelist, claiming that "worn metaphors" come closest to truth...
...revealing something that is true. In other words, there is a hierarchy of messages folk singers work with--things ranging from describing a visual and sensual environment to moralizing. You get the idea from listening to all nine of his records in a row that Dylan not only puts Truth at the top of his hierarchy, but also is finding messages that are true as he writes, not having known before he started writing what they were...
Someone from Newsweek asks him how many children he has. "Some," Dylan answers. It's funny. The point is also that you don't look back. Ideas flash into your mind; you find truth where it is instead of lying in wait for it. You call to mind experiences and ideas and characters you've read before when the occasion makes it right to use them. You DON'T try to go back over ideas you've had before to tell a Timemagazine reporter what the message of your songs is. And when someone from Newsweek asks about your children...
...struggle of the necessary cooperation of people to provide for themselves. You've got to work with other people. Saint Augustine expands the common struggle people share to include the necessity for a religion to explain things. If Dylan weren't trying to help people seek a comparable truth, he would not be making records like this...
...album represents a stylistic change in his expression. Dylan's earlier efforts to find truth as an object is replaced by songs that try to identify a truthful process. This change in what Dylan is doing I think explains why John Wesley Harding is the title song. The hero is a cowboy (your standard American mythology) who is always trying to do right (read: seeking truth). The song doesn't complete a story; we never learn what he wants or what happens. Dylan has just identified his character to be the spirit of the album--the truth seeker...