“And we’re also using Dylan songs in the mass, and the songs will just sound like hymns,” Sr. Henning Emil explains, excited. An ordained Lutheran minister in his early 50s, Sr. Henning surpasses other Dylan fans in his devotion. Having managed to intertwine his deep interest in Bob Dylan with theological studies and ecclesiastical work, Henning organises possibly the only annual Icelandic celebration dedicated to this monumental artist.
Freewheeling by nature, this year sees the third edition of the Bob Dylan Festival. It was first held in Skagaströnd, then in Reykjavík at Iðnó, and is now an hour and a half outside the city in Flúðir. The festival’s name changes yearly — and obviously is always taken from a Bob Dylan title. This year, the festival is called Tíminn líður hægt, a translation of the song ”Time Passes Slowly” from Dylan’s 1970 record New Morning.
Tíminn líður hægt is a two-day affair: the first day offers performances from no fewer than seven different bands playing renditions of the artist’s music, complete with a pub quiz and small speeches from Henning between acts.
“I have this short prose about if Dylan had been born in Iceland, where he would have been born, and so forth. I basically substituted everything from his story and put it into an Icelandic [context],” he ponders.
If you’re curious, you’ll have to attend the festival to hear about Bob Dylan’s potential Icelandic life. But I’ll tell you this — Icelandic Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Abramsson, maybe?) was from Skjaldfannardalur in Ísafjarðardjúp.
“Handle With Care”
Henning is based in Reykjavík, but working as a pastor has let him travel the country giving sermons, specifically, his sermons on Bob Dylan. His fascination with the folk singer has a long history, discovering Dylan’s music through his father’s copy of Highway 61 Revisited. Further down the line, Henning even wrote his master’s thesis in theology about Bob Dylan. Admittedly, he thought, ”It would be clever just to write about Bob Dylan because it would make certain things easier — writing about something that you already know a bit about.”
Now, Henning is preparing for his staple Bob Dylan sermon. “We pick one Dylan song and then mix it into a gospel reading, I take the sermon from there,” he says. “We’re actually using a very rare song now, “Red River Shore”, because there were a few lines in there I thought were really interesting,” Henning adds.
The Dylan tracks selected to be “hymns” will be performed by just a few duos, mostly just a singer and someone accompanying on an instrument. In the past, this has been implemented in different ways, even corralling 50 people into a choir to cover a Dylan song. They performed “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or, more precisely, they performed “Tímarnir líða og breytast,” as they translated the song into Icelandic.
“It’s just been really inspiring because this is a grassroots thing,” Henning admits. “It’s something that people are doing for other people. It’s good for relations between people, that’s a wonderful aspect of it.”
The festival doesn’t just inspire social bonding, but also creative thinking. “You’re not allowed to perform the same song twice,” Henning points out. “My band usually takes some very rare songs, because we were so late to the table,” he laughs, “So that has also been inspiring.”
“The Times They Are A-Changin’”
Coordinated by Hermann Sæmundsson, who acts as a sort of leader for this Rolling Thunder Revue, Henning is quick to commend him. When ruminating on this year’s location, Henning is ecstatic with the choice of Flúðir, explaining, “It’s always nice to go outside of the capital area because I think that that’s a different kind of magic.”
And Henning is not just looking forward to this year’s festival, but even further into the future. “We’ll finish this, and then we’ll just wait for Hermann to tell us where we’ll go next and what to do,” he says.
Even when I think that’s a great note to end on, Henning exclaims. “And then I forgot to tell you! One of the greatest things is that after the mass, we go and eat banana bread, baked after a recipe from Bob Dylan’s mother!” What could be better than that?
Tíminn líður hægt is Saturday, May 24 to Sunday, May 25, at Félagsheimili in Flúðir. The Bob Dylan mass will be held in Hrunakirkja. Tickets are for sale on tix.is
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