Bob Dylan’s closed out the 60s with Nashville Skyline (1969), a short, sweet, straight-up country album featuring a drastically different singing voice.
In the midst of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, this was viewed as a puzzling move by an artist who just five years earlier was soundtracking the protest era with The Times They Are a’Changin’.
Day 17 of the 30 Day Music Challenge calls for a rather strange offering: ‘A Song That Features Your Favorite Artist.’
First of all, this requires me to have a favorite artist, which I think is an impossibility. My favorite artist at any given moment depends on what I’m listening to, my mood and a dozen other factors. Second, what exactly does “features” mean in this context? Is it the same as ‘A Song By Your Favorite Artist,’ in which case why not just say that? Or does my favorite artist have to be featured on somebody else’s track (in the now ubiquitous “feat.” sense)?
A nice Random Weekend selection today from Bob Dylan’s album The Basement Tapes, which was released in 1975 but largely recorded in 1966. Dylan was backed by members of The Band on many of these songs, which were recorded in various homes in Woodstock, New York.
‘Tears of Rage,’ the closing track of Disc One, was written by Dylan and Richard Manuel. It is widely interpreted as an indictment of American materialism in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.
I’ve praised Bob Dylan’s recent albums of standards originally performed by Frank Sinatra, though my readers generally aren’t as impressed. Today’s song comes from Dylan’s second such album, 2016’s Fallen Angels.
This time around, I’ll let professional music critics do the heavy lifting. Here are a few quotes compiled on the album’s Wikipedia page.
Now that we know the first and second place winners of Montauk Madness, today’s runner-up matchup will decide who gets the bronze medal: Bob Dylan or The Beatles?
This pairing was the one considered inevitable by many readers, and indeed it’s the championship battle I arrived at when running through the brackets myself. It pits the most celebrated solo artist in history against the most celebrated band.
Meet Me In Montauk 