The year’s best album re-issues include rock legends, essential R&B artists, classic pop, jazz, alternative rock, global beats and so much more.
Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” captures America at the peak of the civil rights struggle when African Americans were forced to fight for a country that had left them impoverished and disenfranchised.
Blues singer/guitarist Rory Block reaches back to her youth for inspiration in this tribute to Bob Dylan, choosing tunes that “touched her heart and soul”.
Cat Power and her band are not a simulacrum of Bob Dylan; they gracefully step into the songs, striking the right balance between honoring and making it anew.
For the American political right of the post-war era, folk music more than rock ‘n’ roll was regarded as a national threat – but not because of the songs’ lyrics.
Bob Dylan’s third album The Times They Are A-Changin’ was his darkest and most political, a modern folk landmark that remains a template for socially conscious music.
Cat Power’s version of Bob Dylan’s 1966 concert with the Band in Manchester is reverential but not literal and honors the legend more than the facts.
Are Bob Dylan’s improved vocals in his later years a deliberate aesthetic choice? Has he re-focused his attention on the art of singing?
As Bob Dylan learned, only through baring of one’s soul does one show the way forward, providing both a glimpse into the other and perhaps the shape of things to come.
The great “songster” Dom Flemons has pandemic stories to tell, but also shares his new album’s inspirations, including a love of Bob Dylan and Black cowboy narratives.
Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding is more about what it is not than what it is. Does that hold true for the mythology of John Wesley Hardin himself?
How American folk songs of the Earth, from Woody Guthrie to Neil Young, tilled the soil for the rise of ‘Green Pop’.
