Bob Dylan
New York City, New York7 reviews across 4 releases
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and moved to New York in 1961, entering the Greenwich Village folk scene under a borrowed name. His early acoustic writing drew on traditional folk and Woody Guthrie, while his mid-1960s recordings brought electric rock into the same song-centered framework. Later work moved through country, gospel, blues, and jazz without settling into one style. The records represented here show a songwriter increasingly interested in age, spiritual uncertainty, and damaged relationships. Oh Mercy uses murky guitars, piano, harmonica, and vivid characters; Time Out of Mind places weary songs inside a muffled, organ-led blues setting; Love and Theft turns toward loose Americana, rockabilly, and comic storytelling, even fitting a knock-knock joke into one song.
In 1975, Dylan took the Rolling Thunder Revue across the northeastern United States and Canada, reshaping familiar songs into rougher, more theatrical performances later represented by Live 1975. He continued touring heavily, including the long-running concert schedule that began in 1988. A heart illness nearly killed him in 1997, the year he recorded Time Out of Mind, which returned him to original songwriting after albums of traditional material and addressed mortality without abandoning hope. Love and Theft followed in 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks gave some of its lines an unintended new resonance. Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, released Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020, and is still performing.
4 releases reviewed
Oh Mercy
Time Out of Mind
Live 1975