Nashville Skyline - Dylan, Bob (Cassette 1990)

The morning after Johnny Cash died, I was in my car, driving down to some corporate plaza in South Atlanta to do a training. I was wondering to myself about how long it would take the local country

You wouldn't know it by my recent reviews, but my god am I on a Bob Dylan kick of late. I can't really explain where it came from -- I'm guessing it's the desire to hear music that isn't one of the three colors of modern popular music: JOY! SADNESS! GRRRR! I wanted something subtle, poignant, memorable, poetic and nuanced. It began with putting Dylan's second record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, on the stereo. The arrogant, barely in his 20s Dylan singing about journeys, aging, broken hearts, war and death as though he really understands what these words mean. But such was the beauty and...

The title, Nashville Skyline, is a little misleading. There's far more of Dylan here than of the ghosts of Hank Williams And Patsy Cline, but it is one of his better albums. The album opens with a duet with Johnny Cash on Girl From the North Country. This is a much more polished version than that on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Also in some way, perhaps because of Cash's intonations, more in line with the Appalachian folk sound than the earlier version. On the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the song has the whiff of the midwestern prairies on a late Autumn evening, like the singer has left for a job..

Bob Dylan is an acquired taste. Some people pick up one of his less accessible albums and are scared away by Bob's voice, which sometimes sounds like a croaking plea for help from someone who mistakenly swallowed household cleaners. What they don't realize is that Bob's released so many albums that there's bound to be something, somewhere in his back catalogue, that they will enjoy. In my case, the path to Bob started with Nashville Skyline. Pop music fans might be familiar with the album's most famous track, Lay Lady Lay, which features a very sparse arrangement featuring slide guitar and...