The Dylan Diaries -- Favorite albums: Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

A great thing about this dissertation process is that it's exposed me to Dylan songs and albums that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to listen to otherwise. Yesterday at the end of class a student asked me a question about the obscure Basement Tapes track, "Apple Suckling Tree," and I felt like a real Dylan scholar as I answered his question. So in discovering new songs and albums, I have naturally discovered new favorites, which I would like to write about here. Today's post, however, is not about a new favorite, but about an old one: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

There's a lot that I could say about the impressive classic songs on Freewheelin'; about the sparse musical arrangements that remove all the polish from "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Don't think twice, it's all right" if, like me, you grew up hearing the Peter, Paul, and Mary versions; and about the way this album changed everything in the sixties folk movement. It's a great album in its own right. But The freewheelin' Bob Dylan tops my list of favorite Dylan albums for purely sentimental reasons: whenever I listen to it, it takes me back to where I was when I bought it and listened to it for the first time.

It was late 2005 and early 2006 and a friend and I were serving together as youth workers in the tiny town of Thornaby, England. We enjoyed working with the kids and playing and organizing lots of music for the church there, but we also had plenty of free time, which we used for walking to the only Starbucks for miles around, buying bath bombs at Lush (a store that we didn't yet have in the states), and, of course, traveling.  One of our adventures brought us to Bangor, Wales, where an out-of-town acquaintance graciously let us stay in his home while he was away. Bangor is just across the water from Dublin, Ireland, so, while we were there, we took the ferry to Dublin for a day. Our day in Dublin is somewhat fuzzy. I think I got a little seasick on the ferry, and we definitely got lost wandering around Dublin.  But one part of the day stands out: on one of those many side streets we went down in an effort to figure out where we were going, we found a used CD store, where I purchased the latest Jamie Cullum CD, and, you guessed it, Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. I had no particular attachment to Dylan; I knew some of his songs of course, but not his recordings of them, but I am a sucker for classics, so I thought that this classic album would be the perfect addition to my CD collection.

When we got home that evening, worn-out, a little sea-sick, and tired of being around crowds of people, we each sought out some alone time, which I found with a cup of tea and a small CD player in the kitchen, where I put in my new purchase and experienced Bob Dylan's music for the first time. The songs made me feel both homesick and, somehow, at home, right where I was. Dylan's gravelly voice still bothered me, but it began to grow on me as well. And old familiar tunes like "Blowin' in the Wind" felt fresh -- lines that felt like cliches because I'd heard them so often sounded relevant and poetic. Dylan was the perfect companion for "alone time," and that little trip to Bangor and Dublin became the beginning of a larger journey toward grad school and this desk chair, where I sit, struggling to write a doctoral thesis about Dylan's work.

Freewheelin' is still one of my favorite albums; today, my husband and I own a vinyl copy, and we even recorded one of the classic songs from the album, "Don't think twice, it's all right" on our latest EP. (Which, if you didn't know by now, is available for free on Noisetrade, or for money at Amazon and Itunes). These days, I'm almost more in love with the album cover than the album's content -- Dylan and then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo look so hip and happy. Also, that scene was so lovingly recreated with Charlotte Gainsborough and Heath Ledger in the film I'm Not There, that I get a little sad thinking about Ledger -- one of my favorite, late actors -- whenever I see the cover, especially in the large vinyl LP format. But whether I'm hearing it in analog or digital, whether I sit and listen intentionally or just hear a random track from the album on Spotify, whether I'm viewing the album cover or its film re-creation, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan does not fail to take me right back to the winding streets of Dublin and a quiet kitchen in Wales, and that alone makes the album wonderful to me.