Most of the songs on "John Wesley Harding" have pared-down lyrics. Though the style remains evocative, continuing Dylan's use of bold imagery and the extravagant surreality that seemed to flow in a stream-of-consciousness fashion has been tamed into something earthier and more to the point. "What I'm trying to do now is not use too many words," Dylan said in a 1968 interview. "There's no line that you can stick your finger through, there's no hole in any of the stanzas. There's no blank filler. Each line has something." According to Allen Ginsberg, Dylan had talked to him about his new approach, telling him "he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something. He wasn't just making up a line to go with a rhyme anymore; each line had to advance the story, bring the song forward. And from that time came some of his strong laconic ballads like 'The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.' There was no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental." This mirrors Dylan's increased interest in painting at the time. Each song creates profound images i.e. "two riders were approaching", and each song is concise, complete, yet leaving room for interpretation. Even the song structures are rigid as most of them adhere to a similar three-verse model, although much of the beat patterns throughout the measures were time-shifted, that is, units of three and five beats were employed over the four beat structure.