10. Self Portrait

It took me a lot of time to start writing this one. There was no urgency: I am relistening to the albums of Dylan I have listened to so far, and apparently that is more than enough to keep me busy. I simply didn't feel the need to write so that I could allow myself to start listening to the next album. And I notice that some of these albums already have assembled lots of connotations - for example, Dylan's first album is connected to a camping in Denmark and the world football championships of 2014 (Holland loosing the semi-final).

That is not to say I kept relistening to Self Portrait. Rather, I kept returning to the Big Three: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and especially Blonde on Bonde. Occasionally, the earlier acoustic work (I am currently listening more to that) and John Wesley Harding. The span in years of those albums is approximately the span in years of the complete work of The Beatles - and although there is no way to compare both 'oeuvres', it is amazing in both cases that only in some eight years' time a singer or a band can come up with such a body of work.

Having said that, the strangeness of this album makes that I am not attracted to listening to it too much. There are songs I like - the laid back 'Alberta #1' (yes, there is a #2), 'Days of 49'. There is very lightweight but nice music - the Hawaiian tinge of 'Early Morning Rain', or 'Belle Isle' with its humming strong orchestra. There is the instrumental 'Woogie Boogie'. There are completely outrageous songs, like 'In Search of Little Sadie', the remake of 'Little Sadie' also on the album, with all its bizarre modulations just out of reach of Dylan's vocal capacities. And there is the polished crooner's voice of songs such as 'Let It Be Me' and Blue Moon'. And then there are the live versions of Highway 61's 'Like a Rolling Stone' and of 'The Mighty Quinn', and there is a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Boxer'.

It sounds completely haphazard, and probably that was the idea at the time - to stop being Dylan-the-Saviour and to become Dylan-Just-Another-Musician. The opening song, 'All the Tired Horses', with an absent Dylan (at least I don't recognize his otherwise rather recognizable voice), is telling. He was well on the way of deliberately erasing himself. Which is, having read the biography, admirable in its own right.