Ahh… dylanchords.com. A long time ago, when the internet was in its puberty and I just ridded myself of »Music« as a subject in school, you were there for me. A website in the style of the times, which filled my youthful admiration of Dylan with an actual, achievable, purpose: To teach myself to play the guitar (after a fashion). I scanned those songs for the evil F chord and other cryptic nastiness (Bm7-5?!), printed out and tried to recreate one after another (after a fashion). Soon enough I tuned my borrowed guitar in Open D tuning and played a heartfelt Buckets of Rain. I felt sad but proud, the family went from amused to annoyed, and my guitar skills from pre-beginner to amateur.

The guitar, Dylan, and dylanchords.com would stay with the through university. Printing out old-style HTML would take a detour through an arguably more old-styled system, and that mere process helped convince a number of people that I had sufficient interest in »culture« to be worth their time. Today, the resulting »project« is dormant, and made obsolete by more recent technology.

And yet, dylanchords stayed with me. The .com domain name effectively moved to another one for reasons that don’t seem to matter so much now, and these days, picking up an instrument isn’t something I do daily anymore. Or even weekly. But dylanchords still seems to matter. Recently, even the choice of subject has arguably been vindicated.

It being Christmas today, it feels right to thank the creator. No, not that one. Eyolf Østrem has »tabbed« around 900 songs, with patience and skill that others couldn’t even think of displaying, to not even mention giving away all this work for free. Thank you, Eyolf Chordmaster. We don’t always agree. It doesn’t matter. Thanks for your work. It inspired me, I’m sure it inspired many others.

Merry Christmas.

For further convenience, I’ve started hosting a jekyll-generated, mobile-enabled version of Eyolf’s chordwork at dylaniki.org (code at github). I find it useful for looking up songs from the phone, and maybe others feel the same.