The 1969 album that changed how Bob Dylan sang: “I stopped smoking”
There was never a point in his career when Bob Dylan was going to be winning any awards for his superior vocal skills.
He was always working with what he had every time he stepped up to the microphone, and that could sometimes sound beautiful or like nails on a chalkboard depending on what he was singing. But if he had the right songs to work with on his tunes, Dylan could be as much of a chameleon as people like David Bowie whenever he walked into the studio.
That is, in the vocal department. Dylan wasn’t going to suddenly give his fans the odes to other genres that ‘The Starman’ used to do on his records, but Dylan’s strong suit was more in the lyrics than anything else. He could take on different characters depending on what the song needed every single time he stepped up to the microphone, and while that could mean a gripping ballad of one of the most caustic protest songs ever, he was going to bend his voice into whatever shape it needed to be.
But if he had decided to stay in his electric period for the rest of his life, no one would have blamed him for that. The public may have been confused when he picked up an electric guitar and started making rock and roll, but Dylan needed to make that kind of transition if he wanted to stay true to what he was feeling. He needed the biggest platform possible for a song like ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ but after he started getting a God-like complex in the public eye, he realised he didn’t really want it.
He never claimed to be the voice of a generation like everyone wanted him to be, and no matter what he did, he would be praised for steering the entire music world forward. The motorcycle accident would have been a great way for him to peel back from the public eye, but even when he returned on the album John Wesley Harding, fans were still looking at him for all the answers. He never had any of them to begin with, so he chose the next best route for him to take: genre-hopping.
After all, the folk community already hated him for going electric, so what better way to lose his audience than trying his hand at making a country record? The rock and roll crowd was going to be thrown for a loop when they heard Nashville Skyline based on the songs alone, but when they put it on the turntable, everyone was questioning what the hell happened to his voice. His more nasal shout had been replaced with a soft spoken voice, but Dylan felt it was the most natural thing in the world to sing this way.
It might have helped that he stopped smoking, but Dylan felt that this approach suited his voice a lot better than anything else, saying, “There’s not too much of a change in my singing style, but I’ll tell you something which is true…I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed…so drastically, I couldn’t believe it myself. That’s true. I tell you, you stop smoking those cigarettes [Laughter]…and you’ll be able to sing like [Italian opera singer Enrico] Caruso.”
In typical Dylan fashion, he might just be yanking all of our chains by saying that, but it’s not like his voice is worse for it by any stretch. If anything, his updated version of ‘Girl From the North Country’ with Johnny Cash is one of the best instances of an artist updating their own hit, and no album could be considered totally unsalvageable if it had a ballad as great as ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on it.
Even if the success of this album did eventually lead to Dylan doing the drastic tonal shift he did on Self Portrait, it wasn’t like Nashville Skyline was a failed experiment by any stretch. If we were to keep the Bowie comparison going from the top of this page, this album was to country what Young Americans was to Philly soul, and while that was going to turn some people off, it’s hard to really hate on it when it still sounds this solid decades after the fact.
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