I have to be honest. I don’t know about this one.

I set out to do another set of AI-assisted lyric illustrations, this time all of one song in its entirety… Bob Dylan’s “Visions Of Johanna”.

I got a little ways into it, and it was going well, when a few times in a row the generative algorithm overemphasized cats I had added as incidental background elements in the prompt, to interesting effect. So I had the brilliant idea: let’s illustrate the whole song with cats. I backtracked and started over again.

It was an instructive lesson, one that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped.

It’s just hard to get a lot of variety out of the Stable Diffusion XL algorithm when the main subject is cats. Turns out, visually, cats are really not a very expressive medium. And especially so for lyrics of a song that refers often to relationships between things, and even moreso, talks in terms of absences, things which are missing or gone—ideas which are already tough to express in the kind of direct, concrete terms that a generative AI algorithm will understand.

As a result, I had to do a lot more experimentation, so the results are stylistically inconsistent—but I had wanted this gallery to stand as a unified piece, not a collection of disparate images. I’m actually now much happier with the unfinished set of original (non-cat) illustrations, which I have begin to clean up and post a sample gallery of on another page, under “Previsions Of Johanna“.

In the mean time… I’m posting this set because I did put a lot of work into it, and I do like many of these images individually, but, I just don’t know. As a whole it doesn’t work the way I wanted it to.

Click any image to enlarge
I.

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin' to be so quiet?

We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

And louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of johanna that conquer my mind

II.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain

And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “d” train

We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight,
ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane

Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
she’s delicate and seems like the mirror

But she just makes it all too concise and too clear that johanna’s not here

The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of johanna have now taken my place

III.

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously

He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously

And when bringing her name up he speaks of a farewell kiss to me

He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall

How can I explain?
oh, it’s so hard to get on

And these visions of johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

IV.

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial

Voices echo, this is what salvation must be like after a while

But mona lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles

See the primitive wallflower freeze

When the jelly-faced women all sneeze

Hear the one with the mustache say, “jeeze I can’t find my knees”

Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
but these visions of johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

V.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him

Sayin’, “name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

But like louise always says “ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
as she, herself, prepares for him

And madonna, she still has not showed
we see this empty cage now corrode
where her cape of the stage once had flowed

The fiddler, he now steps to the road
he writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
on the back of the fish truck that loads
while my conscience explodes

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain

And these visions of johanna are now all that remain