Forever Young

Baez covers this Dylan song with a deliberate simplicity that strips away everything the original carried — the gospel choir on the Band recording, the orchestral sweep of other versions — and returns it to something like a spoken blessing. The acoustic arrangement is minimal: guitar, her voice, space. The lyric, which Dylan wrote for his son Jakob but which escapes its biographical origins easily, is a father's prayer for a child facing the world: stay brave, stay just, stay curious, stay young in the ways that matter. Baez brings something Dylan's versions couldn't quite achieve — a mother's quality of tenderness, a warmth in the upper registers of her voice that makes the wish feel urgent rather than sentimental. The tempo is unhurried. She doesn't try to impose her personality on the song but instead becomes transparent to it, a delivery mechanism for the blessing itself. Cultural context: this was recorded during a period when Baez was increasingly focused on her role as a transmitter of other people's important songs rather than solely a writer. Best heard as an actual blessing — at a birthday, a graduation, a beginning.