Where Bob Dylan & Joan Baez’s Relationship Stands Now After Their Messy Breakup—Is There ‘Animosity’ Between Them?
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were once folk music’s power couple. After watching their professional and romantic relationship play out in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown—which starred Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro as the iconic duo—many fans have a renewed interest in their complicated history.
Their story began in 1961 when Baez, already a folk star in her own right, first saw Dylan performing in Greenwich Village. Despite describing him to Rolling Stone as a “scruffy little pale-faced dirty human being” at the time, she was immediately moved by his talent. “I, of course, internally went completely to shreds, ’cause it was so beautiful,” she recalled. What followed was a relationship that mixed music, romance, and eventually, heartbreak—leaving many fans wondering where they stand today.
Where’s Bob Dylan & Joan Baez’s relationship now?
The short answer: they don’t have one. Despite their profound impact on each other’s lives and careers, Dylan and Baez, both in their 80s now, have largely gone their separate ways.
In a 2023 interview with People magazine, Baez revealed that she and Dylan never truly reconnected after their relationship deteriorated in the mid-1960s. However, she described finding “total forgiveness” after painting a portrait of the singer. “I put his music on, and I just dissolved into tears,” she said. “When I was through with the painting, I had no animosity left. None. It’s remained that way.”
Dylan, famously private about his personal life, has occasionally spoken warmly of Baez. During a speech at the 2015 MusiCares Gala, he praised his former partner: “Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. A truly independent spirit, nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn’t want to do it. I learnt a lot of things from her. For her kind of love and devotion, I could never repay that back.”
Their final major musical collaboration came in 1982 at a Peace Week concert at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. The surprise reunion featured a three-song set including “With God On Our Side,” a cover of Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”—a poignant choice, as Dylan had written the latter shortly after they first met.
When Rolling Stone asked Baez the following year if the couple would ever get back together “when they’re both 60 or something,” her response was characteristically blunt: “Spare us, please. Both of us.”
Though their romantic relationship was relatively brief—Baez once told Rolling Stone, “You mean what period of three months was it?”—its artistic aftermath has proven to last. Their connection inspired several songs, most notably Baez’s 1975 hit “Diamonds and Rust,” which Dylan himself admired. “To be included in something that Joan had written—ooh. I mean, to this day, it still impresses me,” he said in the 2009 documentary, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound.
In the years since, both artists have carved out remarkable individual legacies. Dylan, with more than 50 albums and 6,000 songs to his name, has received nearly every major honor, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Baez released over 30 albums before retiring from touring in 2019 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.
