It’s all there - glorious and cringe-worthy - and waiting to be discovered, revisited, forgotten, salvaged, and, most of all, celebrated.įor now, though, as we celebrate Dylan’s birthday, we’ll choose to focus on only the best of the best. That means phases where he’s penned songs that spoke to a generation and etched their words into our souls but also phases where he seemed to be just really into Jesus or wanted to follow in Sinatra’s footsteps. Dylan, if nothing else, has been, and continues to be an artist of phases - one still “busy being born” even as he turns 81 years of age on Tuesday (May 24th). And, yes, some of Dylan’s 39 studio albums and the songs that populate them are painfully awful.īut that comes with the territory. Yes, there are albums here with nary a flaw on them, but sometimes that pales in comparison to the excitement of finding a great Dylan song on a terrible Dylan album. Sure, we all know the euphoric sound of Al Kooper’s organ riff kick-starting “Like a Rolling Stone,” but there’s also the intense pleasure of identifying with a deep cut you’ve always skipped over in the past. Revisiting these albums has been a complicated and daunting joy. So many songs that a generation of listeners once claimed as their own have now found their way into the ears of children and grandchildren and will continue doing so for as long as albums and songs continue to be mediums we embrace.
The albums ranked in the following pages are a rare breed in that many mark their times but also mark all times. We can proclaim with even more confidence - in fact, utter certainty - that no artist has left a more exalted or scrutinized collection of albums and songs behind. This article originally ran in 2021 and has been updated.Īpart from, say, Frank Zappa - and that’s a rabbit hole many of us aren’t prepared to go down - there probably isn’t a more sprawling body of work in popular music than Bob Dylan’s discography.
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