The album Bob Dylan called a “breakthrough”
The slight issue with Bob Dylan is that the man himself is an unreliable narrator.
Given that he spent a good portion of his early career lying about his origin, and he has spent the rest endlessly changing his mind and opinion about his own works, Bob Dylan can’t really be trusted to be the authority on Bob Dylan.
But really, no artist can be. They’re too close to their own work, so their thoughts and opinions on it can never be objective. They’re too shaped by the personal experience of writing something, the experiences that prompted it or even the experiences that they had during the process, where a good day in the studio can make them love a record more, and a bad one can make them hate it.
Dylan especially seems susceptible to that. Or, mostly, he seems like an artist deeply susceptible to proximity bias. In any of the interviews he’s conducted, he’s most likely to declare his more recent work his finest. Or at least, generally not reflect too far back to the olden days when it comes to talking about his music.
But maybe it’s a good thing. Dylan is clearly an artist who likes to keep moving forward. However, it does add to the question of whether the musician’s reading of his own career is ever accurate.
Here is a good example from 1981, when Dylan begins talking about the album he sees as a complete breakthrough.
“That was a breakthrough album for me,” he said, talking about 1975’s Blood On The Tracks, adding, “In another sense of lyrics.” To him, this album was unlike anything he’d done before and took him to whole new places lyrically.
He continued, “I’ve done things I’ve never done before. This is just a different sort of thing, it’s the thing I’ve always wanted to do.”
But the question is – did he? Really? If anything, Blood On The Tracks feels like an album where Dylan comes home. It had been a weird period for his fans after he straight-up admitted that 1970’s Self Portrait was designed to make them hate him, and the three albums that followed seemed to stay on that path as his voice seemed to be changing rapidly and often, he’d stray too far into weirdness.
Don’t get me wrong, there were good songs in that period, but on Blood On The Tracks, he returned to gold with a ten-song tracklist of all winners. He also returned to the perfect balance of savagery and poetry that he was beloved for, shown best in the transition between ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ on side A.
It’s a perfect Dylan album, full of gorgeous acoustic guitar moments on the folkier songs as well as a good nod to his enduring rebellion. Simply, it just feels like him. After a period of frantic changed, Blood On The Tracks feels familiar, rather than, as Dylan says, something completely new.
Clearly, he can’t be trusted. “I’ve come as far as there is to come and now I’m gonna start doing instrumentals,” he said in 1981, claiming that he’d officially completed lyricism and so would now abandon it. Three years later, he put out Infidels – complete with lyrics.
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