IAN MacDONALD
Ian MacDonald (born Ian MacCormick; 3 October 1948 – 20 August 2003) was a British music critic and author, best known for both Revolution in the Head, his critical history of the Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a study of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. MacDonald was instrumental in popularising Nick Drake during the late 1970s and early 1980s. (More from Wikipedia)
The most complex and imaginative of these songs, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is sometimes mistakenly linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis; but actually, Bob Dylan had already written the song before the crisis happened. In the liner notes on the album, Dylan famously spoke of this song: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Author Ian MacDonald described “A Hard Rain” as one of the most idiosyncratic protest songs ever written.
(May 2013)
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The title song of All Things Must Pass, “All Things Must Pass” is considered to be one of George Harrison’s finest compositions. As told in Wikipedia: “Music critic Ian MacDonald described ‘All Things Must Pass’ as ‘the wisest song never recorded by the Beatles’, while author [and Harrison biographer] Simon Leng considers it ‘perhaps the greatest solo Beatle composition’. The subject matter deals with the transient nature of human existence, and in Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ reading, lyrics and music combine to reflect impressions of optimism against fatalism. On release, together with Barry Feinstein’s album cover image, commentators viewed the song as a statement on the Beatles’ break-up.”
(September 2014)
