2. Bob DylanBlood On The Tracks
Weirdly, I think Dylan’s protest mode never quite 100% rings true to me. It rings 98.5% true, but somewhere, in the back of my mind, there’s something inauthentic about it, in some way. And I think he may have felt that. I mean, what’s Dylan’s best song ever? Probably ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and that’s just sneering at somebody, a woman he’d been in a relationship with.
As a body of work, Blood On The Tracks is faultless, there’s not a bum note in there, not a bum word, everything transports you. You know, it’s brilliant storytelling, and he’s not trying to be too clever. With Blonde On Blonde, which is an album I love, he’s trying to make himself come across like a brainiac, talking about Verlaine and French poets, which is fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, but maybe you feel… I guess he always does that.
I suppose Blonde On Blonde is slightly more obscure, slightly more difficult, whereas Blood On The Tracks, he’s just storytelling, he just wants to talk about this break-up. I remember being with a girlfriend and her friend, and she said, "here’s the new Dylan thing" – it draws you in, it immerses you in it and as soon as I started hearing it there was no room for anything else.
