When I was an adolescent, this was my favorite Bob Dylan album. I think my tastes were even grimmer back then than they are today because this is the bleakest Bob Dylan album...well, ever. After the empowering but still foreboding opening title track, there is only a single ray of sunlight, in the form of the uplifting "When the Ship Comes In." The other 8 songs are full of war ("With God On Our Side"), economic devastation ("Ballad of Hollis Brown," "North Country Blues"), racial violence ("Only A Pawn In Their Game," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"), & permanent goodbyes ("One Too Many Mornings," "Boots of Spanish Leather," "Restless Farewell"). Depending on how I'm feeling, the darkness of this album is almost suffocating--& whether in spite of that fact or because of it, it's still my favorite of his early acoustic period.
It's also the album that begins his transition from the strident topical songwriting of his first 2 to the more artistically free music he'd start making with the next one. Dylan is still somewhat in his imitative stage here, as this album owes a great debt to Woody Guthrie--from the oblique-angle adaptations of traditional refrains to the aw-shucks demeanor concealing his polemical intentions to the gently massaged Marxism (in a nation of such abundance, there's no reason people's literal lives should depend as much on economic factors as the protagonists of "Ballad of Hollis Brown" & "North Country Blues"). The former song is a masterpiece of sonic storytelling: by simply picking a single minor chord the entire time (a trick he's reusing from "Masters of War" on the previous album), Dylan creates a droning, insistent musical backdrop. It doesn't change when you think it should--kinda like Hollis's life--which gets creepier the longer it goes on. The latter half of the song throws a series of close-up images at the listener, like a sequence of monochrome crime scene photos: a patch of blackened grass, a handful of shotgun shells, a shotgun that moves from the wall to a farmer's hands. On top of those details & devastating imagery ("your wife's screams are stabbing you like the dirty driving rain"), Dylan shifts the mode of address from the 1st person ("his cabin broken down") to the 2nd person ("your children are so hungry that they don't know how to smile"). The shift makes an already confrontational song even more so--Dylan puts the listener in Hollis's shoes, left with the implicit question of how it all came to this.
Another song that feels visual to me is "One Too Many Mornings," which Dylan sings in a near-whisper while doing some elegant (if simple) fingerpicking. He paints a delicately-observed picture of the narrator leaving a room, & noticing the details both inside & outside. Nothing is overtly stated, but you somehow know that the lovers referenced in the song will not be lovers much longer. Another shift in the mode of address occurs here, but it is more ambiguous as to whether "my love" in the 2nd verse is the same person addressed as "you" in the 3rd, but I feel like it is. "One Too Many Mornings" says more in 120 words than most breakup songs can say in 5 times that.
"Only a Pawn In Their Game" commemorates the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, & points out the ways the racist establishment turns poor white people against black people, but rather than using that to excuse or ameliorate the crimes of racial terrorists like Evers' assassin, in Dylan's view it adds to their degradation. He points out that Medgar will be remembered as a king, but his murderer will never be anything more than a pawn.
Even this album's production is thinner than before or after: there are no full band breaks like "Corrina, Corrina" on the previous album or piano like "Black Crow Blues" on the following one. We are stuck with Dylan's trebly guitar, thin reedy voice & piercing harmonica (& there's even less of that than we've been used to). All of this adds up to a record that I can't just listen to at any time--maybe when I was younger I could, but I've seen too much of the world now to take this stuff lightly. I have to be in the mood to hear this, but when I am, there are few albums, from Dylan or anybody else, that hit quite this hard.
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