“Song To Woody” from the debut album is a song that I will never tire of. I’m sure you could write down a dozen memories and associations of your own that would be every bit as biting, poignant and triumphant as anything I could come up with.įor the record, here are a few notes I made while listening again through Dylan’s albums-some of which I hadn’t really sat down and paid attention to for decades: Positively Fourth Street was the perfect evocation of how I felt during any number of adolescent betrayals. As was the case for so many other people I’ve met, the songs on Blood on The Tracks and Desire steered me through disastrous breakups. Like anyone reading this, I have my favorite Dylan songs and can remember vividly the times, situations and people I was with when I heard them or when they were especially important to me. In many ways, it’s been a musical journey like no other. So, as a remedy to this kind of sensory overload and the subsequent numbing that it brings, I started listening to all of Bob Dylan’s albums in order, one or two a day, to really prepare for writing this piece. It’s too easy now to simply acquire music en masse and not give any of it the time that it deserves to slowly unfold and insinuate itself into our hearts and ears. It is also true that the prevalence of illegal downloading and the emergence of services like Spotify have taken away the pleasure and diminished the nearly sacred experience that purchasing, unwrapping and listening to a new recording once had. It’s almost too much to house so much music together under a single cover, and my greatest worry with sets like this-if there are any other sets like this-is that the sheer volume of output listeners are presented with will overwhelm them and prevent them from absorbing all that is on offer. It is likely that no other living artist’s work and life has been so thoroughly examined and distorted with so many cloaks thrown over his body of work in an attempt to encapsulate and make sense of it. How do you reconcile an artist whose song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was sung at The March On Washington before Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 with the man who gave his blessing for “Love Sick” to be used in a Victoria’s Secret television commercial? Does it even matter? Obviously, Dylan’s is a music that has permeated every level and machination of society from the sacred to the political to the outrageously commercial.

There’s been so much water under the bridge, so many cultural movements, wars, presidents, assassinations, disasters-man-made and natural-that have spanned the years of Dylan’s creative career that it’s dizzying to even consider putting his work into context. When presented with 52 years of living packed into 35 studio and six live albums, it’s almost impossible to know where to start when whole books have been written about a single Bob Dylan song.

Bob dylan discography numberd