“My Back Pages” is a song written by Bob Dylan and included on his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. It is stylistically similar to his earlier folk protest songs and features Dylan’s voice with an acoustic guitar accompaniment. However, its lyrics — in particular the refrain “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now” — have been interpreted as a rejection of Dylan’s earlier personal and political idealism, illustrating his growing disillusionment with the 1960’s folk protest movement with which he was associated, and his desire to move in a new direction. Although Dylan wrote the song in 1964, he did not perform it live until 1978. “My Back Pages” has been covered by artists as diverse as Keith Jarrett, the Byrds, the Ramones, the Nice, Steve Earle, the Hollies, and the Byrds. (More from Wikipedia)
His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan was released later in 1964.
His song “My Back Pages” is most direct about this new direction in his music and is blatantly self-critical – particularly in the chorus line, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”. The Byrds released a version of “My Back Pages” in early 1967, the seventh and last Bob Dylan song that the band covered and released as a single.
In 1965, speaking of “My Back Pages” specifically, Dylan told Margaret Steen in an interview for The Toronto Star: “I was in my New York phase then, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for fear they’d be misunderstood. Now I don’t care if they are.”
(May 2013)
