Highway 61 Revisited

Recorded in New York in June and July 1965, this album marks the moment Bob Dylan turned fully from acoustic folk toward electric rock, pairing his surreal, cascading lyricism with a loose, blues-driven band sound. The opening track, built around an organ riff improvised on the spot by a young musician who had talked his way onto the session, became an unlikely hit single and reset expectations of what a rock song could be. The record takes its title and its restless, carnival-dark imagery from the actual highway that threads through the blues country of the Mississippi Delta up through Dylan's native Minnesota, and its songs populate that landscape with carnival barkers, desperate lovers, biblical figures and literary ghosts. It arrived in the wake of Dylan's electrified, booed set at a folk festival that same summer, cementing his break from the folk purist audience and alienating some while thrilling many more. Critically it is regarded as one of the pivotal rock albums of its decade, prized for its wit, its density of allusion, and the way its closing nine-minute epic reimagines the ballad form entirely. It remains central to Dylan's reputation as a songwriter and to rock's claim to literary seriousness, influencing songwriters across genres in the decades since.