20 best Bob Dylan songs: The tracks to hear before watching A Complete Unknown
A master songwriter, here's Bob Dylan's best songs, ranked!
From his roots in New York’s Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early ‘60s to his more recent role as a grizzled blues journeyman, Bob Dylan, who turns 84 this year, is one of rock music’s most intriguing, fascinating, baffling and enigmatic figures.
A spokesperson for a generation, he caused shockwaves by going electric, then further testing fans by making Christian rock records in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. There’s probably been more written about him than any other artist, and it's hard to think of a more influential songwriter in rock 'n' roll history.
He's penned some of the greatest songs ever and is one of the most covered artists of all time – Adele, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, Guns N’ Roses, Kesha, The Roots, Cher, Bryan Ferry, Nick Cave and The Rolling Stones are just some of the acts who’ve interpreted his work.
But with such an extensive back catalogue, knowing where to start with Bob Dylan's music can be intimidating.
That's where we come in. To celebrate the release of the new Dylan biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown’, directed by James Mangold and hitting cinemas this month, we’ve chosen what we think are the iconic singer-songwriter’s top 20 songs. It wasn’t an easy task, and, funnily enough, the answer wasn’t blowin’ in the wind...
20. Man in the Long Black Coat (1989)
One of the highlights of the ‘Oh Mercy’ album, ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ is a haunting and atmospheric tale of a woman who leaves her home and disappears with the mysterious figure in the song’s title. Could he be the devil or death? The track was recorded in New Orleans and producer Daniel Lanois captures the eerie ambience of a Louisiana bayou – he even used the sound of local crickets for added authenticity.
19. Murder Most Foul (2020)
Dylan’s longest song – it clocks in at almost 17 minutes – ‘Murder Most Foul’ was the first single from his thirty-ninth studio album, ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ and appeared out of nowhere during the COVID lockdown in 2020.
Using the Kennedy assassination as its starting point – ‘Twas a dark day in Dallas – November ‘63/ The day that will live on in infamy’ – this dark ballad was delicately arranged with tinkling piano, mournful violin and light percussion, and had many of us scratching our heads as we tried to work out all the cultural references in it. At least it helped to pass the time while we were stuck indoors.
18. I Threw It All Away (1969)
This sad and beautiful song from the ‘Nashville Skyline’ album is sung by Dylan in a country croon rather than his trademark raspy voice.
Written about the failure of a relationship, for which he takes the blame – “I once held her in my arms / She said she would always stay / But I was cruel / I treated her like a fool / I threw it all away” – it’s been covered by Cher, Elvis Costello and Scott Walker. Nick Cave named it as his favourite Dylan song and said he wished he’d written it.
17. Things Have Changed (2000)
Composed for the soundtrack of the film ‘Wonder Boys’, starring Michael Douglas, this moody blues-rock shuffle was released as a single in May 2000.
It finds Dylan out of harmony with the world, but not really giving a damn: ‘People are crazy and times are strange / I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range/ I used to care, but things have changed.’
Sound engineer, Chris Shaw, who worked on the track, said it was learnt, recorded and mixed very quickly in an afternoon. It picked up an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Not bad for a few hours’ work, eh?
16. Mississippi (2001)
‘Mississippi’ was originally laid down in the sessions for Dylan’s 1997 album ‘Time Out of Mind’, but it didn’t make the cut – a new version ended up on ‘Love and Theft’ four years later.
Dylan said the original hadn’t been recorded very well and that he was glad to have had the chance to revisit the song and finally nail it. We’re glad he did too, as it’s a superb country-rock track, with Dylan playing the part of a drifter who regrets coming to Mississippi, where his past catches up with him. We’ve all been there…
15. Not Dark Yet (1997)
One of Dylan’s most beautiful and poignant songs, the shadowy ballad ‘Not Dark Yet’ sees him confronting his mortality. It’s as if he’s singing it on his deathbed and looking back at his life – ‘I've been to London and I’ve been to gay Paris. I've followed the river and I got to the sea’ – although he was only 56 when the song came out, in 1997, on the album ‘Time Out of Mind.’
Dylan’s vocals sound fantastic and there’s a dreamlike and hypnotic quality to the music, with organ, slide guitar and pedal steel creating a wonderful twilight country feel.
Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode) and Soulsavers did a great version of it on the 2021 covers album ‘Imposter.’
14. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (1963)
Written by a 21-year-old Dylan in 1962, this classic bittersweet folk song, with a backing of acoustic guitar and harmonica, sees the young singer-songwriter reflecting on his relationship with his then girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who has left him on his own in New York while she is away studying in Italy.
In the sleeve notes of the 1963 album, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, which the song appears on, Dylan says of it: ‘It isn't a love song. It's a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It's as if you were talking to yourself.’
13. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966)
In the 1976 song ‘Sara’, which Dylan penned for his wife, he mentions that he wrote ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for her while he was living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
It’s one of the greatest gifts anyone has bestowed on someone else – a waltz in a 6/8 time signature that was recorded in the early hours of the morning, which gives it an otherworldly and magical quality, as does some of the imagery that Dylan uses: ‘With your mercury mouth in the missionary times, and your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes/ And your silver cross and your voice like chimes…’
Coming in at over 11 minutes, it takes up the whole of the fourth side of the vinyl edition of the double album, ‘Blonde On Blonde’.
12. Visions of Johanna (1966)
We’re staying with ‘Blonde On Blonde’ for this seven and a half minute epic – another song that was supposedly written by Dylan at the Chelsea Hotel.
The session for it took place at the Columbia Recording Studios in Nashville on Valentine’s Day 1966, which is apt, as it’s one of Dylan’s greatest love songs, but also one of his most intriguing, mystical and surreal compositions.
It contains wonderfully strange and poetic lines like: ‘The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.’
In 1999, Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, said ‘Visions of Johanna’ had the greatest song lyric ever written. Listen out for Joe South’s cool, throbbing and funky hillbilly bass playing, which drives this alluring masterpiece.
11. All Along The Watchtower (1967)
Most people know this song from Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary version, which is one of the best covers of all time and is even better than Dylan’s original, which appeared on 1967’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ album.
Hendrix’s full-on, electric rock take on it is more powerful than Dylan’s stripped-down recording, but Bob’s has a sense of menace too, thanks to his wailing, bluesy harmonica.
Striking lines like: ‘Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl / Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl’ allude to what’s around the corner. Something wicked this way comes…
10. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (1966)
It’s back to ‘Blonde On Blonde’ for another of Dylan’s failed relationship songs: ‘I didn’t mean to treat you so bad / You shouldn’t take it so personal / I didn’t mean to make you so sad/ You just happened to be there, that’s all...’
Released as a single in February 1966, ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’ was the first song recorded for the album – the session took place in New York, but the rest of the record was made in Nashville.
Keyboardist Paul Griffin lays down some magnificent piano and Al Kooper plays the organ, which had become an integral part of Dylan’s mid-‘60s sound.
9. Ballad of a Thin Man (1965)
One of Dylan’s most vitriolic songs, it’s always been a mystery who the ‘Mister Jones’ mentioned in the lyric of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ is. Could it be Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, or maybe it’s Jeffrey Jones, a writer who upset Dylan when he interviewed him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Maybe we’ll never know...
What’s certain is that it’s a fantastically brooding track, with Dylan on funereal piano and Al Kooper adding some seriously spooky organ. At the end of the recording session, drummer Bobby Gregg, said: ‘That is a nasty song, Bob.’ He wasn’t wrong....
8. Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
The second track from Dylan’s fifteenth studio album, the classic ‘Blood On The Tracks’, which was released in 1975, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ deals with a romantic encounter and the poetic lyrics are full of rich details, which adds to the mysterious and bewitching atmosphere: ‘They walked along by the old canal, and stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burnin’ bright/ A saxophone someplace far off played.’
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said it’s one of two songs that reduces him to tears every time he hears them – the other is ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ by Tom Waits.
7. Tangled Up In Blue (1975)
‘Tangled Up In Blue’ is the opening song on ‘Blood On The Tracks.’ Written in the summer of 1974, when Dylan moved to a farm in Minnesota, following the breakup of his marriage to his wife, Sara, the shifting narrative deals with the nature of relationships and laments a lost love, but also looks at changes in time and place – at one point, the narrator drifts down to New Orleans and ends up ‘workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat right outside of Delacroix.’
Dylan once claimed that the song took “ten years to live and two years to write.”
6. Blind Willie Mctell (1983)
One of the criticisms of Dylan is that he’s often left some of his best songs off albums, and that’s certainly true of ‘Blind Willie McTell’, which was recorded during the sessions for 1983’s ‘Infidels’ but discarded – it finally surfaced on the 1991 ‘Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased)’ box set.
Named after the blues singer and guitarist of the same name, the song has a melody that’s loosely based on the jazz standard, ‘St. James Infirmary Blues.’
Dylan biographer, Clinton Heylin, said: ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was ‘Dylan’s one indisputable masterpiece of the early ‘80s.’ We’d be inclined to agree with him.
5. Desolation Row (1965)
The final track on Dylan’s 1965 long-player, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, this could easily lay claim to being one of the best closing songs on an album ever.
It’s an 11-minute-plus epic ballad, featuring surrealistic imagery and a whole host of weird and wonderful characters, from Cinderella and Cain and Abel to the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera.
During the recording session in New York, producer, Bob Johnston, invited musician Charlie McCoy, who was visiting the city, to play some Mexican-style guitar fills, which makes ‘Desolation Row’ sound like it should be heard over the closing credits of a gritty Western movie.
4. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1963)
Originally written as a poem, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ is one of Dylan’s most powerful protest songs.
Featuring just the singer and his acoustic guitar, the call and response structure was inspired by the traditional Scottish folk ballad ‘Lord Randall.’
Composed in 1962, during the era of the Cold War, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ has become associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it supposedly dates from before that event.
Dylan was only 21 when he penned this stark and unsettling song that warns of an impending apocalypse. Chilling stuff.
3. Positively 4th Street (1965)
Released between Dylan’s albums ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Blonde On Blonde’, this standalone single shares a lot with his classic 1965 song, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, both musically and lyrically.
Drenched in Al Kooper’s glorious organ sound, it’s another of Dylan’s nasty songs – critic Dave Marsh called it “an icy hipster bitch session,” with “Dylan cutting loose his barbed-wire tongue at somebody luckless enough to have crossed the path of his desires.”
Rumoured to be about Edie Sedgwick, the actress, model and New socialite who was part of Andy Warhol’s scene in New York and was romantically linked with Dylan, it opens with the brilliant line, ‘You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend...’
Ouch...
2. Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)
Described by Dylan’s musician friend Tony Glover as “the first rap record”, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was the start of the singer-songwriter ‘going electric’.
Delivered in a rapid-fire, stream of consciousness style, this rock and roll-meets-protest-song was inspired by Chuck Berry’s ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ and scat songs of the 1940s.
It was famously accompanied by an iconic promo film, which was filmed behind the Savoy hotel in London, and saw Dylan tossing aside cue cards with the lyrics written on.
John Lennon said ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was so good that it made him wonder if he could still compete at writing pop music.
1. Like A Rolling Stone (1965)
When Bruce Springsteen first heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ on the radio in his mother’s car in 1965, he said it changed his life and that the opening snare shot sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to his mind.
According to Dylan, it started out as ‘this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long’, but he cut it down and came up with something that was unlike anything he’d written before.
Driven by session musician Al Kooper’s improvised Hammond B2 organ riff, which came about by accident in the studio, the caustic ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ – yes, it’s another one of his ‘nasty songs’ – went on to define Dylan’s mid-‘60s electric sound, which saw him jettison his folk singer roots and become a full-on, sunglasses-wearing rock star.
A pop single that lasted over six minutes was unheard of at the time, so radio stations were initially hesitant to play it, but it soon became a worldwide hit.
‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is such a ground-breaking, influential and important song in the history of rock and roll that whole books have been written about it.
Not only that, but the title of the new Dylan biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown’, takes its name from a line in the lyric.
We’ve chosen ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as Dylan's greatest song. How does it feel?
