The Completist
On listening to Bob Dylan's entire studio catalogue
Not long after my wife and I bought our house I began an experiment which is still ongoing. The premise is simple; once or twice a year I pick a musical artist and listen through their entire catalogue in chronological order. The first artist to receive this completist treatment was Wilco, whose work I commenced playing during one of those bursts of painting that often accompanies moving into a new place. It was summer, and I spent a week sweating profusely while rolling one of our upstairs bedrooms a lush midnight blue to the strains of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost Is Born, and Sky Blue Sky.
I have subsequently made my way through the repertoire of various other artists. In 2023, I tackled U2 while building a treehouse for my kids, then burned through most of Bruce Springsteen’s catalogue while waging what would ultimately prove to be a disastrously failed campaign to take back my front yard from the aggressive weeds that rule that space with the vice-like grip of a Honduran street gang.
I decided from the outset that I would limit myself to studio albums, both because that’s already a lot of music with most groups, and because I suspected that whatever essence I was trying to get a feel for would be compromised by the interpolation of live recordings and compilations. I mean, I love Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits. I love James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. But they are not artifacts of those artists’ development in the way that Rumours or Sweet Baby James are.
As I say, studio catalogues often contain plenty of material, as was the case with Tom Waits, whose 20 studio albums constituted a marathon of circus bawling that I don’t exactly regret subjecting myself to, but the consumption of which did, by the end, feel like a kind of penance performed. Still, nothing, not even Waits, could have prepared me for the awe-inspiring, planet-sized slab of music I confronted upon deciding, on something of a whim, to listen through the records of Bob Dylan. Dylan released his 20th studio album in 1985, and has continued releasing music at a steady clip ever since, meaning that when I reached the point in my Bob-A-Thon equivalent to the end of the Tom Waits Experience, I still had… forty years of albums to make my way through.
What was I looking for? What was I hoping to learn?
I knew I wouldn’t be getting a story. Not in any straightforward sense. Music, at least in terms of a collection of albums made across decades, doesn’t work in the way that sports, or political campaigns, or soap operas do. It does not have easily discernible narratives, and its protagonists will always remain more or less fogged behind a glass the public can never penetrate. What I came away with — what I always end up with when I run these experiments — is not a story so much as an overarching pattern, something that comes in and goes out like a tide. I set out in search of an aura, cruising for a vibe, and when it comes to vibe, Bob does not disappoint.
The man has had many, many, many phases to his career. There was his early folk singer phase, of great renown, followed by the transition to electrification, which caused so much uproar at the time. There was his work with The Band, and his trio of “Christian” albums, and his smoky late career takes on the Great American Songbook. One of the unexpected discoveries I made during my listen-through was that I am a bigger fan of post-1988 Bob than of all that comes before. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Folk Bob — “Boots of Spanish Leather” is a contender for my all-time favorite track of his — and those early days of unabashed adulation for Woody Guthrie, fingerpicking in dim cafes, and hunching over typewriters while chain smoking produced a cache of achingly beautiful songs. “Girl From the North Country.” “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Gorgeous stuff. But the swampy, swashbuckling rambles of Aging Americana Bob are where I get my best mileage.
I use the term “Americana” here as a loose catch-all for the many different elements — from delta blues, to country western, to boogie-woogie, to 80s synth pop — contained in the wicker cornucopia of Bob’s bountiful later decades. He has always been a bit of a collagist; you listen to something as early as his sprawling Self Portrait (1970), which opens with an engrossing female vocal refrain, then segues into all manner of acoustic and country tracks, and then, just before wrapping up, shoehorns in a track like “Wigwam,” in which Bob sings a childish melody over and over atop a dreamlike collection of horns, and you realize that he’s been haring off in all directions for most of his career. But, honestly, this was news to someone like myself, for whom the association with Dylan as folk singer was so deeply grooved, and my familiarity with his other music so scant, that the discovery of this vast attic filled with other weird stuff was a revelation. Also, there is the way his voice his aged.
Oh, that voice. What to say about it that hasn’t already been said? Bob Dylan’s voice is incredibly nasal. Everyone knows this, everyone already has an opinion about it. For me, his whole style of singing, from the nasal tone, to the distinctive pronunciation, to the muttering, slurring, sometimes downright disheveled aspect of his generally funky vocal delivery had already been noted, accepted, and slotted into the mental package of what listening to his music entailed. Or so I thought. But as I made my way farther and farther into his catalogue, a process which corresponded directly with Dylan’s physical aging, I realized I was liking his voice more and more. It’s not that the peculiarities of his singing — which from another angle are the beautiful parts — had changed. Rather, his voice, sandpapered down by the passage of decades and all those packs of American Spirits, had mellowed into a gently warbling growl that was both more palatable to my tastes, and seemed to fit the material better.
Young Bob stands alone on the boards of venerable British and American theaters, wielding nothing but a guitar and a harmonica. The unforgettable, black coffee voice cuts through the rapt silence. Aging Bob, seated at a piano, surrounded by a backing band who carry him along as he noodles the ivories while rasping out the lyrics to “Duquesne Whistle” or “Mississippi,” does not need to command the silence, only to dispel it a little bit longer.
When you listen to 37 consecutive albums by the same artist, you get a sense of their default moves. The ways they change yet remain the same. The magnetic pole they are lashed to. Bob doesn’t have the Achilles’ heel that so many songwriters do, where they end up falling back on familiar harmonies or melodic progressions. This is impressive, particularly given that his style of songwriting, though it morphs across the decades, has remained consistently simple and stripped down. His tunes are often devoid of bridges, solos, or anything but verses and proto-choruses, making them pure vehicles for Dylan’s omnivorous tendencies, by which he seeks to vacuum up and transmute the entire 20th century of American music into a rolling carnival whole.
If you want to jump on that carny wagon, 1989’s Oh Mercy is an excellent place to start. Generally viewed as a return to form after a handful of lackluster efforts, the album opens with “Political World,” a perfect example of the harmlessly scowling honky tonk drifter persona Dylan adopted roughly halfway through his career. There are icicles of slide guitar, galloping bass, and lyrics about a shadowy, uncertain world that never seems all that threatening. It’s charming if a little goofy, but don’t stop there, because if you give this horse its head you’ll soon come to “Ring Them Bells,” an elegantly simple pairing of organ and piano whose recursive figures serve as a scaffold for Dylan’s lyrics at their poetic best.
Ring them bells, sweet Martha, for the poor man’s son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
Oh, the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled with lost sheep
Then along comes the atmospheric “Most of the Time,” showcasing Dylan’s leathery wineskin voice, tremulously evocative against the shuffling tempo, and before you know it you’ve reached “Shooting Star,” a final slow waltz that conjures an aging couple twirling on a dim dance floor, clutching each other for a few minutes before the lights come back up.
Music writers are fond of describing artists in terms of death and rebirth. Johnny Cash is but one of many famous examples of this phoenix phenomenon, whereby a washed-up star well past his prime re-emerges from the wings for a final act. But Dylan never went anywhere. Never stopped recording. Never stopped going on the road. His live performances since the 80s have all been codified under the moniker of “The Never Ending Tour,” and he has maintained a devoted fanbase for over 60 years. It was once said of Dylan that he was in danger of disappearing into a myth of his own creation1, but at some point the myth became fused with the living man, who, rather than disappearing just kept making music.
I doubt anyone can ever fully untangle another person’s motives, but, I must say, my spiritual road trip with Bob did not leave me suspecting that he has made dozens of albums because he needs more money or an excuse to tour. Instead, I got the impression that he views his art as his work, and has rarely stopped working. Dylan is not Ryan Adams, whose avalanching volume of releases carries a whiff of the compulsive, but he certainly doesn’t come off as someone who overthinks his art. He just creates, and creates, and creates. The man is oracular in both senses; an utterer of enigmatic koans, and also someone through whom some spirit is being channeled. You get the sense he won’t stop serving as a vessel until the very end.
Maybe that’s a fitting place to conclude this piece about my own little Never Ending Tour through the man’s art. I enjoyed the music as it was playing, despite being unsure what I would make of it all in the end. I’m still not sure. But then, he’s still singing, and I’m still listening. I guess we’ll both keep at it a while longer.
Michael McClure, Rolling Stone magazine, 1974
I love this piece so much. Terrific