Bob Dylan

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Essential Albums

  • Time Out of Mind
    Time Out of Mind

    By 1997, fans were wondering whether Bob Dylan had anything left in his artistic tank, but a near-fatal illness had clearly inspired him, resulting in a dark, moody album filled with resignation and visions of mortality. The spare and loose “Trying to Get to Heaven” and the mysteriously beautiful “Not Dark Yet” are album centerpieces, while “Til I Fell in Love You,” with its droning organ, tells us that new love isn’t without deep tensions and anxiety. The haunting Daniel Lanois production captures Dylan’s mood, and his croaking vocals, perfectly.

  • Desire
    Desire

    After Blood on the Tracks re-established Bob Dylan's creative authority, the reinvigorated artist went about planning his next move. Inspired by The Patti Smith Group's energy and repartee, Dylan sought to find a collection of musicians who could work synergistically with him, and The Rolling Thunder Revue was born. The group went on tour (best represented on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5), and Dylan collaborated with theater director Jacques Levy. The two wrote much of what became 1976's Desire, one of Dylan's most commercially successful albums. Songs like "Hurricane," "Isis," "Joey," "Romance in Durango," and "Black Diamond Bay" took on heady narratives that proved the collaboration was an artistic success. Scarlet Rivera's violin is an integral part of the mix, with bassist Rob Stoner and drummer Howie Wyeth giving the sessions a loose but focused appeal. Emmylou Harris provided harmony and backing vocals throughout. Written by Dylan alone, "Sara" closes the album. It's one of his most touching, extremely personal, and straightforward love songs.

  • The Basement Tapes
    The Basement Tapes

    A tossed-off vibe, a complete lack of focus and continuity, and poor fidelity: doesn't sound like a recipe for a rock-era touchstone, does it? Yet these elements are exactly what give The Basement Tapes its considerable charm. Recorded in the summer of 1967 at the "Big Pink" house near Woodstock, N.Y., this set captures Dylan and The Band woodshedding, bouncing ideas off the walls and each other. Steeped in traditional American roots music, these 24 tracks have the feel of a laid-back song swap. Though many of the tracks here are silly, sarcastic, or just downright weird, some display an elegance, beauty, and gravity that add much-needed balance. Songs like "Tears of Rage," "This Wheel's on Fire," and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" would later become beloved classics, but even the lesser-known cuts ("Bessie Smith," "Katie's Been Gone") here are stirring and memorable.

  • Blood On The Tracks
    Blood On The Tracks

    Whether Blood on the Tracks was inspired by the Russian author Anton Chekhov or Dylan’s crumbling marriage to Sara Lownds or that private store of composites and impressions from which all artists inevitably draw is beside the point: By 1975, listeners should have known better than to expect a straight answer from Bob Dylan. Still, the yen to get to the bottom of the album’s inspiration makes sense—an emotional payload this heavy and you want the reassurance it actually happened to someone. Part of the allure was that Blood was the first time in years Dylan had sounded so serious. Self Portrait, New Morning, Nashville Skyline, John Wesley Harding: For years after his 1966 motorcycle accident, almost everything Dylan did seemed like an attempt to subvert people’s expectations of what it meant to be Bob Dylan. The irony was that as the persona got muddier and his sense of it more elastic, the material got clearer and simpler. Not that Blood on the Tracks laid Dylan bare—if anything, the album’s grace is how carefully it walks the line between confession and allegory, wallowing and reflection, the folksy and the cryptic. In some cases (“Idiot Wind,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”) Dylan’s vocals are so exaggerated it’s impossible to believe he’s singing about himself; in others, it’s so naturalistic and lived-in (“Simple Twist of Fate,” “Buckets of Rain”) that it’s hard to believe he’s singing about anyone else. Interestingly, Dylan’s early sketches of the songs—some compiled on 2018’s archival release More Blood, More Tracks, some only surviving as notes—are more lyrically direct than what ended up on the album. And then there’s Dylan’s decision to scrap several of the album’s stark early sessions for takes recorded in Minnesota with a hired backing band Dylan barely knew—a gesture that made the final product sound livelier and more self-assured, but also strangely impersonal. In other words, what you hear on Blood on the Tracks is, in part, an artist negotiating how thick they want to make their shell. By the time the album came out, the singer-songwriter phenomenon Dylan had been unwittingly lumped in with had mostly dispersed, or—in the case of artists like Paul Simon and James Taylor—become part of pop more generally. Meanwhile, younger artists like Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith were taking Dylan’s approach to poetry and the romance of the American myth in new directions, with Born to Run and Horses, respectively. You could see how it might be reassuring to hear an artist as willfully impenetrable as Dylan sing something as humble as “Buckets of Rain,” or a line like “You’re an idiot, babe/It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”: The genius—he’s finally letting his guard down. But as much as Blood is remembered as the postmortem of an ordinary human marriage, it also kicked off a decade for Dylan that included the Rolling Thunder Revue, an embrace of backing vocalists, a radical conversion to Christianity, and, eventually, synthesizers. There are moments of stillness here, moments of reflection and purity. But in the end, the only constant was change.

  • Blonde On Blonde
    Blonde On Blonde

    Dylan had a sound in mind that he couldn’t get from the usual New York musicians, so he, Robbie Robertson, and Al Kooper went to Nashville to record with producer Bob Johnston and the city’s best session cats. The epic, visionary songs—“Visions of Johanna,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”—lean on ensemble musicianship that keeps the energy moving forward, while a subtle tenderness underscores “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie.”

  • Highway 61 Revisited
    Highway 61 Revisited

    This album is electric in every sense, a nervy jangle that finds a taunting Bob Dylan fronting a full-fledged rock band and shedding his folkie past. The title tune, “From a Buick 6,” and “Tombstone Blues” have more to do with garage-y American proto-punk than Help! or Rubber Soul, The Beatles’ releases that frame this album’s era. There may be nods to the blues (“It Takes a Lot to Laugh”) and his recent folk history (“Desolation Row”), but Dylan’s language intoxicates; it’s poetic, brilliantly snotty, and sometimes inscrutable.

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About Bob Dylan

The history of popular music can essentially be divided into two eras: before and after Dylan. The Minnesotan raconteur born Robert Zimmerman didn’t just unleash rock ‘n’ roll’s latent social conscience and poetic potential, he ushered in the age of the artist as auteur—the idea that true art in music, particularly in the practice of album-making, comes from the personal expression of the artist himself. During the societal upheaval of the early ’60s, he emerged as an icon thanks to inspirational singalongs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” But since shocking his folky faithful by going electric in 1965—a transformation heralded by his seething signature track, “Like a Rolling Stone”—he’s constantly defied expectations by pursuing his every whim, laying out a road map to creative freedom that was immediately inherited by the likes of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Neil Young. That non-conformist ethos has endured long past the ‘60s: Dig into “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and you’ll find the seeds of punk’s sneering attitude, rap’s motor-mouthed repartee, and indie rock’s ramshackle DIY aesthetic. And yet Dylan is perpetually at the center of the conversation—an artist who's encompassed the entire American musical experience over his career, from folk and country to blues and gospel to jazz and rock—and one step removed from it. From the bad-romance wreckage of 1975’s Blood on the Tracks to the sobering meditations on mortality that permeate 1997’s Time Out of Mind to his 21st-century restorations of the Great American Songbook, he’s retained his uncanny ability to tap into the human condition while continuing to cultivate his singularly enigmatic aura.

HOMETOWN
Duluth, MN, United States
BORN
May 24, 1941

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