List: 70 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs of All Time
As Bob Dylan turns 70, I’m beginning to realize that it’s time for me to shit or get off the pot. I’m 25 years old as I put these words to paper. By the time Robert Allen Zimmerman had turned 25, he had penned some of the most powerful verses American popular culture had ever digested. Dylan is treated, though he may despise it, as a modern day Thomas Paine espousing his Common Sense to the willing masses of the mid-1960s.
The ‘Conscience of a Generation’ was a title that Dylan himself could never saddle. Choosing instead to recede into the background of various solo and full-band projects. Regardless which side of Bob we saw, he always had delicious material:
Sentimental Bob offered some of the greatest love songs all time—see “Boots of Spanish Leather” or “Corinna, Corinna.” Poetic Bob was as subversive as any Nobel laureate on “Desolation Row” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Bob and The Band proved with The Basement Tapes that they could hang with some the best bluesy bar bands in rock & roll history. It all worked because behind all of the various facades lay the same perspective. The same brilliant mind. The same observant, relevant voice.
Brought together, his collection of work is staggering, intimidating. It’s enough to make any aspiring writer’s knees buckle. How does one explain it? If nothing else is certain, there is this: Dylan was able, at various points in his life, to express the intent of his voice and beliefs in a way that is as relatable and coherent as any speaker of the modern English language.
Sorry, I’m not sorry. I don’t think one can exaggerate Dylan’s contribution to the American landscape of thought and social perspective. Call it a muse. Call it divine inspiration. Call it what you like, but the man’s discography is as significant as de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or any other modern philosophical work.
Like any great artist, Dylan exposes his listeners to truths that they already knew about themselves. Sometimes these are conscious truths. More often, though, they are not. They are deeper truths that hadn’t occurred until that raspy Minnesotan uttered them.
Rather than continue to toss unsatisfactory superlatives on the subject, I’ll let the master do the talking. The following is my list of Dylan’s top 70 songs. I think the bard would agree that every listener comprehends and is affected by his lyrics independently. Therefore, I make no argument for this list’s definitiveness.
Though I am confident in my list as a whole, I must admit, the numbers are essentially meaningless. The songs shuffle in order of importance for me as my moods and life experiences change. The songs provided differing comforts and challenges at different stages of my hearing them. Like a long friendship, the voices change, but the essential character remains the same. Some are silly. Some are beautiful. All are fantastic.
1.) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
2.) Visions of Johanna
3.) Like A Rolling Stone
4.) Desolation Row
5.) Tangled Up in Blue
6.) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
7.) Masters of War
8.) Subterranean Homesick Blues
9.) Love Minus Zero/No Limit
10.) Simple Twist of Fate
11.) Boots of Spanish Leather
12.) All Along the Watchtower
13.) Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
14.) Forever Young
15.) When I Paint My Masterpiece
16.) Highway 61 Revisited
17.) It’s Alright Ma, I’m only Bleeding
18.) Dark Eyes
19.) Song to Woody
20.) Gotta Serve Somebody
21.) Crash on the Levee
22.) Hurricane
23.) Fourth Time Around
24.) To Ramona
25.) Maggie’s Farm
26.) Satisfied Mind
27.) Just Like a Woman
28.) The Lonsesome Death of Hattie Carrol
29.) Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
30.) Shelter from the Storm
31.) Things Have Changed
32.) Corrina, Corrina
33.) Oxford Town
34.) I’ll Keep it With Mine
35.) Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
36.) Meet Me in the Morning
37.) Ballad of Hollis Brown
38.) Buckets of Rain
39.) I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
40.) Gates of Eden
41.) Went to See the Gypsy
42.) I Threw it All Away
43.) My Back Pages
44.) You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
45.) Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
46.) Goin’ to Acupulco
47.) Billy 1
48.) Day of the Locusts
49.) Chimes of Freedom
50.) Oh, Sister
51.) Girl from the North Country
52.) It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry
53.) Temporarily Like Achilles
54.) One of Us Must Know
55.) If You See Her, Say Hello
56.) She Belongs to Me
57.) Rainy Day Women No.’s 12 & 35
58.) Positively 4th Street
59.) Slow Train
60.) The Wicked Messenger
61.) If Not for You
62.) The Man in Me
63.) The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)
64.) I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
65.) Early Mornin’ Rain
66.) Every Grain of Sand
67.) Katie’s Been gone
68.) Lay Lady Lay
69.) Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)
70.) Million Dollar Bash
Thought on Tracks 