Category: Bob Dylan

As if to illustrate the neverendless aspect of Blood On The Tracks, Dylan has refused to let these songs settle into a final form; over the past half-century, he’s delighted in adding new verses, switching pronouns and perspectives, introducing new (sometimes very weird) arrangements. “Everything up to that point had been left unresolved,” he sings in “Shelter From The Storm.” And even in 2025, this is an album that still feels beautifully unresolved; you’ll hear it one way today and another way tomorrow. It’s open to interpretation — and interpretations are what we’ve got here, a re-imagining of Blood On The Tracks via some inspired covers. You may know every scene by heart, but there’s still more to discover.

Even in its semi-bastardized state, Shot of Love stands as a major achievement. The songs harmonize into something spectacular, a perfect finished plan. Hard rockers, little love ditties, kaleidoscopic four-dimensional ballads, “Lenny Bruce”: it’s all here, everything you could ever want, bursting out the grooves like a blast of blue-orange Ben-Day dots. It is the album Bob Dylan wanted to make at the time, made the way Bob Dylan wanted to make it. His furnace of desire had not stopped burning. It never would.

Street-Legal is loud and brash and ugly. There’s a little stink to it, no question. But it reveals the world from which it hails in ways unlike any other Bob Dylan record. It is the primal scream of a man and his nation confronting a future of diminished horizons. It is white diamond gloom and destruction in the ditches. It is a seminal document of bad vibes.

Even if Fragments, the latest Bootleg Series release from 2023, is the end of the line, fans have been given hours upon hours of “pretty good stuff” that we’ll all be sifting through for decades to come. To celebrate this bounty — as well as Dylan’s 83rd birthday this week — dig into a very small selection of Bootleg Series highlights, stretching from The Times They Are A-Changin’ to Time Out Of Mind. There’s beauty in every grain of sand.

Last year around Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, we celebrated with a megamix of various renditions of “One Too Many Mornings.” Since there’s no such thing as too many “One Too Many Mornings,” here’s a sequel of sorts for Bob’s 81st — 24 different covers of the classic tune from a wide variety of artists, spanning the decades. Just as Bob never quite settled on a stock arrangement for this one, the interpretations here vary wildly, from gentle folk to raucous garage rock to soaring orchestral pop. Like the song says: “You’re right from your side and I’m right from mine …”