Bob Dylan
Nashville Skyline

We find ourselves at the end of the sixties, and our minstrel has tried in every way, for now with excellent results: protest songs, intimate songs, visionary songs, rock and roll songs, folk rock, and even those with purely religious themes. A sea of works and masterpieces that, in some ways, critics will never manage to discredit for their artistic value. With this album, critics and perhaps even the audience will start to have some doubts about the new vocal and musical features of the Duluth singer-songwriter.

"Nashville Skyline" is one of Dylan's best-selling albums (it ranks fifth after John Wesley Harding) composed of ten songs, sometimes melancholic, other times nostalgic, others are country-western divertissements imbued with blues. The central theme of the work is love, seen and described in various ways but especially in two faces. It starts with the reissue of a masterpiece from a few years earlier, the years of The Freewheelin', the famous Girl From The North Country, sung this time as a duet with Johnny Cash, the low, seductive voice of country. In this new, less sunny version than the first and much simpler in the music, almost bare, it acquires a new face, still listenable, not for everyone, and certainly very interesting in the changes and intertwining of the voices, which chase each other and then finish their "run" in the final verse "she once was a true love of mine".
The second track is Nashville Skyline Rag, a fun but not excellent instrumental moment, imbued with harmonica, guitars, piano, and perhaps some banjo, to create a light atmosphere. To Be Alone With You is the third track, markedly blues, inspired by some texts from the forties or fifties, it is simple and unpretentious, but it makes you feel good. Only flaw: too short and not even a bit of a solo. The fourth track is the testimony of the regret of a man unaware of the importance of the person he had beside him: I Threw It All Away. The guitars and keyboards make it a sad track, the most melancholic of the album. You can't do without love. Peggy Day is the love that drives you crazy and gives meaning, even if only fleeting, to life, told through the funny way of blues. Essential in its 1:59.
If up to this point Dylan and his voice have measured themselves linearly in blues, country, and slightly pop-tinged pieces, now with Lay Lady Lay we reach perfection with music balancing between pop and country. If the love told in the previous songs was mostly innocent and pure, now it is colored with poetic allusions towards sex. In One More Night it tells of a relationship gone wrong, but this time the fault is hers. Betrayal is the theme of Tell Me That Isn't True, a sort of continuation of the sad theme of One More Night.
At this point, we return to fun, even if fleeting (1:35), with Country Pie, a carefree text and perhaps with various allusions that I can't understand. Rock and blues, piano, guitar, bass, drums, a pinch of love and irony are the ingredients of the country pie. The album closes with Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You.

To conclude, a simple album, essential in its music, too brief in its 27 minutes, carefree and sad, the two faces of love, told with simple, rarely metaphorical words, perhaps universal. Bob's voice here is so different from the previous album (John Wesley Harding, 1967) that it is difficult to recognize. Some consider it a wrong work, released at the wrong time: a love album amidst various student protests, not quite fitting from someone who had sided with the right causes in past years. Those who considered him the prophet of values and the right ways to follow will have to change their minds when our Bob, tired of the label stuck on him by the media, will release various "commercial suicides" which in some ways will help him to distance himself from the fans who had become uncomfortable for him.
Dylan no longer wanted to be Dylan and he succeeded even with this album, not a masterpiece but interesting in some ways, for the admirers of the singer-songwriter and his many faces.