David Bowie and Bob Dylan have produced albums of great quality over multiple decades, and this has been related to their ability to reinvent themselves regularly. Both of them have famously changed the style of their music quite overtly on several occasions, and in the case of David Bowie this was even accompanied by a clear change in his appearance at the same time. To name some of the most known phases: there were the Ziggy Stardust, soul or Berlin periods for Bowie, the protest song, electric or christian periods for Dylan.
These periods appear quite clearly through the average song legth per album. When looking at the graphs below one can notice that within a period the average song length is quite consistent and that a period of increase or decrease in song length is a sign of the singer going through a change in his style and transitioningg form one period to another.
And if one takes the appearance of a clear shift in the albums’ average song length as the sign of a successful change it sems that Bob Dylan has been able to keep on reinventing himself the longest, and that over the past 30 years David Bowie has struggled in this regard.
