13. Bob DylanJohn Wesley Harding
It’s hardly celebrated, but I think it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I love the fact that, again like with Simon And Garfunkel and ‘The Sound Of Silence’, you’ve got an acoustic folk artist accompanied by a very basic, rudimentary rock band, just a bass guitar and a drummer. I love those two things playing at once, and even the way it’s mixed, where the bass and drums are on one side, and his guitar and harmonica are on the other. It’s like, ‘there’s the rock, and here’s me doing my thing’. And then the fact you’ve got songs like ‘All Along The Watchtower’ that almost seem hidden, one of the bet songs he’s ever written on an album that sounds so simple, almost like a rehearsal. Every song sounds like it was take one or take two, like they didn’t get to where they wanted with it but said, ‘yeah, that’s fine, let’s move on to the next one.’ I love that, that’s what gives it its magic for me. It was a big influence on [2020’s] Phantom Birds. Before then, I’d been doing this really complicated multi-layered stuff, putting every instrument I could play into every song. But then I thought, I can’t continue with this. I’d been listening to this album, so as a reaction I just took everything back to an acoustic guitar and a really simple rhythm section.
