Bringing It All Back Home

Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home represents the moment that pop and rock music became their own art form, expressions finally treated with the same seriousness and respect as classical and jazz. Incalculably influential, the 1965 landmark established myriad benchmarks in songwriting, sound, artwork, and performance. It served the world notice that Dylan was no longer just the virtuoso visionary tuned into the wants of the folk community. It's a disarming broadcast that declares Dylan's surroundings and personality, and those of his audiences, whether they knew it or not, drastically changed.

More than 55 years after its release, Bringing It All Back Home continues to come on like a prophetic transmission from a savant who's privy to cerebral viewpoints, mental transferences, and "thought dreams" elusive to everyone but him. With the flipside of the album, Dylan strings together four of the most unflinching, forward-reaching, and boundary-breaking acoustic-based compositions ever played. In addressing liberating psychedelia, lost innocence, institutional naiveté, and tarnished relationships, respectively, Dylan constructs a compositional quartet/suite that functions as metaphor for his waving goodbye to political folk music's imprisoning rules and bounding restrictiveness – and a rough guide to the transcendental poetry, shape-shifting vocal phrasing, and alternate tunings he now embraced.

Side One remains one of the boldest cohesive artistic statements ever made. Dylan, forever throwing down the gauntlet to detractors and narrow-minded fans, plugging in with a band and kicking it all off with the in-your-face hootenanny "Subterranean Homesick Blues" before romping, slashing, and rolling through "Maggie's Farm," another fun albeit caustic indictment of homogenous thought and bohemian method. Dylan's attitude undergoes a self-awakening metamorphosis, his lyrical scope broadened, his hallucinogenic interests increased, his willingness to embrace paradoxes and shake them out with mind-convulsing aptitude in line with his progression towards bizarre imagery.

1. Subterranean Homesick Blues
2. She Belongs To Me
3. Maggie's Farm
4. Love Minus Zero / No Limit
5. Outlaw Blues
6. On The Road Again
7. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream
8. Mr. Tambourine Man
9. Gates Of Eden
10. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
11. It's All Over Now Baby Blue