Carole Bayer Sager on Bob Dylan: ‘He is not very collaborative’

Carole Bayer Sager had a difficult time writing a song with singer Bob Dylan because he was so secretive during the process.
The Nobody Does It Better hitmaker has worked with several major recording artists, including Neil Simon, Carole King, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, but a 1986 session with Dylan, who last week (ends14Oct16) was named the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, proved to be a challenge for the 69-year-old.
“He is the one person that is probably the least collaborative person in the world,” she told Live! with Kelly on Monday (17Oct16). “Collaborating with him was strange because it was like trying to read off of someone’s test, who was like covering their test and I’m going, ‘Well what do you think of these words?’ and he’s (mumbling) and it didn’t make sense to me.”
Carole explains she wasn’t comfortable taking credit for writing the track Under Your Spell, but Dylan insisted.
“I would say, ‘What about (this) and I thought I’d die of thirst?’, and I would think he’s writing it down and I would look at his paper later, I would say, ‘Can I see?’, and he has a totally different line down and I said, ‘Bob, I don’t feel right about taking a whole half of this song, you’ve only used a few of my lines,’ and he said, ‘No, no, I wouldn’t have written it if you were not here’.”
Last week (ends14Oct16), Dylan became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, which is given to an individual each year by judges at the Swedish Academy to honour their literary achievement.