Hughes’s reading is stimulating, provocative and searching. Some of his formulations are exact and memorable, as when he refers, for instance, to ‘that strange, characteristic algorithm by which [Dylan] makes a song live by disappearing into it, by becoming its medium’. There was nothing evolutionary about what I was about to do, no one could have expected it. Without knowing as much, I had a gut feeling that I had created a new genre, a style that didn’t exist as of yet and one that would be entirely my own. All the cylinders were working and the vehicle was for hire. I definitely needed a new audience because my audience at that time had more or less grown up on my records and was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare
