My name is Ben Barrel and this is Bob Dylan album by album, a podcast that brings you an in-death look at each Bob Dylan studio recording record by record.

So hope you're good. I hope you've been enjoying this new season. So far in the season we've done a not-so-good album, a kind of middling album, I guess, and now we're going to do a really great album.

Although, having said that, we'll get into this in the episode, so I'll try not to repeat

myself too much, but I think this album is technically brilliant.

I think it's got some of Bob's best performances in this era on it.

I think it's got some of his best songs, some really interesting lyrics.

It's got a kind of fascinating tone, especially when you dig a little bit deeper, as I hope

we do in this episode. But it's not an album I necessarily love. I don't know if you have this with TV shows and

films and music and other types of media or other things you consume, but I can tell if something,

or I can certainly understand if something's really well made or I think is well made,

something that's really well constructed, that's very artistic say,

but I can't fall in love with.

I guess if you're walking around an art gallery, you can see that there's a really great

painting or really great work of art, even if you don't necessarily love it.

But yeah, I think it's a really well-made album, a really well-written album, a really well-performed album,

but not an album that I love. And I don't know

whether that goes back to the first time I listened to it, because I remember listening to

modern times for the first time and time out of mind and lots of other Bob albums that aren't

necessarily classics and thinking they were great kind of from the off. Whereas with this, I felt

like I had to work at it a little bit.

And whilst I have got to a place where I do really enjoy it,

it's not often an album that I go back to time and time again,

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