I never paid much attention to that 70s song Garden Party. When it was new, it sounded like something heard over the speakers at a grocery store, the soundtrack to people comparing prices on soup, believing it matters.

Three weeks ago, I saw Bob Dylan play it. I couldn’t figure out why the man who wrote Everything is Broken was covering a song that once put me to sleep. Then I read the lyrics. The joke was on me.

The song’s about trying to please an audience and realizing the audience is a moving target, it isn’t a game one can win. That struck home. Freddie Stone tried to tell me about this when I was twenty-two. He said, “Forget about them. They’re smart enough to know if your work matters.” I didn’t believe him. At twenty-two I was too busy believing I knew everything about everything.

But he was right. Audiences don’t need you to flatter them; they need you to mean it. If you’re any kind of artist, you can’t spend your life guessing what strangers want. Dylan’s crossed many hostile bridges, booed for going electric, mocked for getting spiritual, accused of many evils short of inventing spam.

So maybe it made perfect sense that an eighty-five-year-old man, having outlived every critic and trend, serenades us with:

I went to a garden party / To reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories / And play our songs again.

When I got to the garden party/ They all knew my name
But no one recognized me/ I didn’t look the same

But it’s all right now/ I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone/ So you got to please yourself