timothee-chalamet | Freshlyworded

Title: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Length: 50 min 4 sec

Number of songs: 13

Best tracks: Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall, Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright

Freshlyworded rating: 8.5/10

Thoughts: From the iconic cover – a hunched-up Bob Dylan walking the cold, snow-covered streets of Greenwich Village, New York with his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo – to the iconic opening song, Blowin’ in the Wind, Dylan’s second album is a superb follow-up to his debut of the previous year that announced his immense talent to the world.

Firmly embedded in the storytelling folk genre, it showcases Dylan’s incredible acoustic guitar and harmonica playing and his songwriting – all but one of the tracks are original compositions.

As mentioned already, the album kicks off with one of Dylan’s most famous protest anthems, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. He was just 23 or thereabouts when he wrote one of the all-time classics, a song about injustice, about callousness, about indifference to suffering (and a song that’s been covered by many other artists).

Another classic protest song – a scathing attack on the people and institutions that create the machinery of mass destruction – is Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’. It contains some brilliant lyrics my favourite being the final two stanzas, delivered with great loathing and power:

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Another classic track, and one of Dylan’s first long songs is A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall, which also made me listen to the great rock version by Roxy Music. It’s a song filled with complex, dreamlike and nightmarish imagery and is rightly regarded as one of his masterpieces. I am still trying to figure out what it all means, but it’s a real cracker.

My favourite track on the album though, and across the first two albums is “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”. I was listening to this beautiful ballad about Dylan’s anger and regret at a broken relationship as I walked down a quiet country road, and it just blew me away. Its power is the way its sung, almost without malice. I immediately listened to it again and have played it many times since getting into this album. It’s one of my favourite songs of all time. Ironically, given the album cover, the song relates to the woman depicted on it, Suze Rotolo, who was leaving him at the time to stay in Italy.

But I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
But we never did too much talking anyway
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

The heaviness of the album ends with a light-hearted song “I Shall be Free” which has some very funny and unusual lyrics.

I came up with the idea to listen and review every single Bob Dylan studio album out of the blue, on New Year’s Eve, 2025. (I guess you could call it a kind of New Year’s resolution).

It seemed like a cool and interesting project, and one that I could do easily with that great modern invention: Spotify.

Imagine having to buy or borrow the 40 albums that the prolific Dylan recorded over the past 63-odd years. It would be quite the task and bloody expensive too.

Why Bob Dylan? I, like millions of other people, have long admired his incredible songwriting, guitar playing and unique singing style.

As a child and then as a teenager I’d heard of Bob Dylan and some of his most famous signature tracks (“Like a Rolling Stone”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”) but I only really got into his music when I purchased a three-CD boxed collection called “Biograph” which had 53 tracks recorded between 1961 and 1981. It introduced me to a much wider collection of Dylan songs, many of which became some of my favourites: “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar“, “Tangled Up in Blue“, “Senor“, “Solid Rock” and “Blind Willie McTell“.

I have since listened to a lot of Dylan albums (at least a dozen) and some of my favourites are “Blood on the Tracks“, “Desire” and “Street Legal“.

But there are so many albums and songs of his I have never heard, so why not take a deep dive into his enormous catalogue and see what other gems I can discover.

A couple of important things to mention. I’ve deliberately not read other reviews of the albums I have listened to before writing my own. I didn’t want to be swayed by the opinions of others. These are purely my opinions and impressions after hearing the album.

However, I have looked up the songs to see if Dylan wrote them himself, to read the lyrics and to do a bit of research about some of them.

So here it goes. Number 1 of 40, Bob Dylan’s first album.

Bob Dylan (1962)

**An autographed copy of Bob Dylan’s debut Album**

Length: 36min, 54 sec

Number of songs: 13

Best tracks: All of them, but top picks: The House of the Rising Sun, Baby Let me Follow You Down, In My Time of Dying, Talkin New York

Freshlyworded rating: 9/10

Thoughts:

Released after Dylan had begun to make his name as a folk singer in New York’s Greenwich Village art, music and poetry scene; his unbelievable debut album was simply titled Bob Dylan. He was 20 or 21 when he recorded it.

The album cover features a fresh-faced (one could almost say baby-faced) Dylan his fingers clasping the neck of his acoustic guitar. He’s wearing a winter jacket with the collar turned up, yellow sweatshirt underneath and a black cap. He stares at the camera in a rather contemplative, serene pose.

I’d give this album 10/10 but have stuck with 9/10 because nothing in life is perfect. Also, to my surprise, Dylan only wrote two of the songs on the album. They are “Talking New York” about his arrival in New York from Minnesota and trying to make it in Greenwich Village. It was the first song Dylan ever wrote and recorded and showcases his songwriting and storytelling abilities. It really takes the listener back to that time, when Bob Dylan was just a young kid with a guitar and (excuse the corniness) ” a dream”.

I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
I get on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, “Come back some other day
You sound like a hillbilly
We want folksingers here”

The other song he wrote for the album was a “Song to Woody” which was a tribute to his idol, folk singer Woody Guthrie.

It includes Dylan’s amazing version of the classic American folk song “Man of Constant Sorrow” (a great version also made its way into the Coen Brother’s movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and an American gospel song written by Blind Willie Johnson “In My Time of Dying”.

Other standouts are Dylan’s soulful and foreboding version of “The House of the Rising Sun” and one of my favourite Dylan songs, his rendition of traditional folk song, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” where he begins the recording telling listeners that he first heard sung by blues guitarist Eric Von Schmidt in the “green pastures of Harvard University”.

Listening to this album, it make sense why many fans were outraged when Dylan started playing the electric guitar, given how deeply he was initially embedded in folk music.

If you’re looking to get into Dylan, there is not better place to start then his sensational debut album.