Hello, my name is Ben Borrell and welcome back to Bob Dylan album by album, a podcast that takes an in-depth look at each Bob Dylan studio recording record by record.

We're currently on a break between season one and season two. This is a little special episode to tied you over until season two starts.

And it's not a look at a Bob Dylan album per se. It's more an abstract podcast answering the

question that I've set myself really. And that is, is Bob Dylan's musical diversity overlooked

compared to his lyrics? As I say in the podcast, I don't think Bob Dylan is underrated as an artist

by any stretch of the imagination. But his music is often overlooked because his lines and verses are just such the

focus and they take such a domineering center stage presence within his work. It's kind of

often hard to remember the music that surrounds them. Here we'll take a look at that music

and how it's shifted and changed over the years and how that might have gone under the radar slightly.

I woke up this morning, there were tears in my bed.

They killed a man I really loved, shot him through the head.

Lord, Lord, we cut your jacks down.

Lord, Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground. whilst I think we can all agree there is little challenge to Dylan being one of the best lyricists of all time.

If not the best lyricist of all time, there's always a slight snagging sense of disappointment from

some areas at his

musical capabilities. Whether it be the recording process with its studio failings, in fact

the enemy once wrote that blood on the tracks was sonically shoddy, or other musicians

talking about Bob's lack of musical craft. Mark Knopfner basically called Dylan's guitar playing

rudimentary on the infidel sessions.

There always seems to be some feeling throughout his career that he was just getting by

musically. This is obviously understandable. There is a large school of thought that sees his

music as just a vehicle for his lyrics. And to a certain degree, I agree with that and I see why that's true. As a poet he used

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