Time Passes Slowly (Biograph Sampler)

This sampler was issued to promote Biograph, the career-spanning box set that gathered familiar hits, album tracks and previously unreleased material from across Bob Dylan's first two decades as a recording artist. The eight songs chosen for it trace an arc from the electric mid-1960s breakthroughs that redefined popular songwriting, through the confessional country-rock of the Nashville Skyline era, into the mid-1970s work that followed his separation from his wife, and on to the spiritually searching songs of the early 1980s. Several of the selections were previously unreleased studio or live recordings at the time of the box set, including an early, otherwise unissued attempt with The Hawks, a mid-1970s outtake, and a live Rolling Thunder Revue performance. Dylan's standing as the most influential songwriter of his generation rests on exactly this body of work - the electric singles, the Nashville sessions, and the restless, confessional writing of the following decade - and Biograph was widely credited with restoring critical and commercial attention to that catalogue in the mid-1980s. The collection was praised on release for both its depth of selection and its liner essay, and it helped set the template for the artist box-set retrospective that followed in subsequent years.