The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan (1963)

Dylan had continued to steadily expand his interest in songcraft and lyrical topics since first getting noticed. The fact that Columbia limited him to almost entirely traditional blues and folk tunes on his first record did listeners a disservice. They didn’t know how many different ways he was applying some radical new ideas to traditional music.

That changed with this second album of nearly all originals that showcased a lot of the things that would make him one of the top figures in popular music for decades to come.

You get tradition, including the Woody Guthrie-inspired “talking blues” style and that showcased his fertile imagination and wry humor.

You get protest songs, both sing-along anthems like Blowin In The Wind and more modern and involved songs about social ills in Oxford Town and Masters Of War.

You get his admitted work on taking apart Hank Williams Songs and seeing what made them work, with a version of Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance that you could overdub pedal steel over the harmonica and would play like a Hank Sr. tune.

You see the beginning of his “literature on vinyl” lyricism, the absurdist and symbolist poetry of A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall

And you get the beginning of his in-depth examination of lost and broken love. Don’t Think Twice and Girl From The North Country presaged some of the most affecting lovelorn tunes of the 70s and onward.

A side note: I have been listening to this record for maybe 35 years. I had never until this morning caught the joke in I Shall Be Free about how spilling black paint on his head caused him to have to sit at the back of the tub. This is why I love the man. There’s always something more.