Bob Dylan, a towering figure in American popular culture for more than 60 years, continues to mystify fans who flock to his music. His songs have inspired social movements and have touched countless lives, yet the man himself remains shrouded in mystery.
Now, with the release of a new film — fittingly titled A Complete Unknown — Dylan is back in the spotlight. The biopic, starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, traces the then-aspiring songwriter’s arrival in New York City and his whirlwind rise to the summit of folk music, culminating in an iconic (and infamous) performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of the most essential Dylan songs from 1961 to 1965 — the time period covered in A Complete Unknown. As you listen, just remember: keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.
13. It Ain’t Me Babe
Coming off the heels of two titanic folk albums that earned him the unwanted moniker of “spokesman of a generation,” this introspective cut from Another Side of Bob Dylan (his fourth record) sounds a warning call for anyone quick to label the enigmatic singer.
Like many of Dylan’s greatest works, the song can be interpreted on multiple levels. The stinging refrain of “It ain’t me, babe” can be read as a gentle rejection to a former lover, as well as a broader refusal to accept the public’s fawning praise. Whatever your interpretation, the oft-covered ballad is significant for bridging the gap between Dylan’s protest songs and increasingly abstract lyrics (“Go melt back in the night / Everything inside is made of stone”).
12. Ballad of a Thin Man
Although Dylan’s disdain for the press is well-documented, it’s perhaps best encapsulated in this eerie blues number from his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. Punctuated with angry piano chords and a sinister-sounding organ, Dylan’s sneering lyrics target a highly educated but intellectually shallow man named Mister Jones.
The song follows Jones as he attempts (and fails) to understand the bizarre characters he encounters in a Kafkaesque nightmare. At times frightening, funny and furious, “Ballad of a Thin Man” is Dylan at his most scathing (“You put your eyes in your pocket / And your nose on the ground”).
11. Subterranean Homesick Blues
Imagine the year is 1965, and you’re running home after buying Bob Dylan’s newest LP, Bringing It All Back Home. You expect to hear a brand new set of folk anthems from the fast-rising protest singer, but instead you’re greeted with the album’s opening number: an electrically amplified rocker hurling beat poetry at your head with the speed of a drug-addled auctioneer.
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is now legendary for its rapid-fire non sequiturs (“Get born, keep warm / Short pants, romance”), which have retroactively been described as a form of proto-rap. Also, don’t sleep on the song’s promotional film — it's an early music video featuring an expressionless Dylan flipping through a seemingly endless stack of cue cards.
10. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Released as the B-side to “Blowin’ in the Wind” (more on that later), this gentle ballad about a scorned lover’s reflections on the road has all the qualities of an A-side recording. Taken from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (his landmark second album), the song’s personal, romantic themes are in sharp contrast to the album’s socially conscious protest songs.
And yet the lyrics, which may seem simple on the surface, are filled with a deep, poetic quality (“And it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe / I’m on the dark side of the road”). Listening to the song, you get the sense that Dylan is convincing himself to move on from his heartbreak in real time. Whether or not he’s successful is anyone’s guess.
9. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Dylan became the first musician to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it’s easy to see why with songs like "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," which is an intricately layered sermon of existential dread. Appearing on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s half-electric, half-acoustic fifth album, the song opens with grim guitar strumming and cryptic imagery that quickly tattoos itself on your brain (“The handmade blade, the child’s balloon / Eclipses both the sun and moon”).
The song unfolds as a kind of letter to the narrator's mother, laying bare the dangers of modern society with some of the most penetrating lines Dylan ever penned (“He not busy being born is busy dying”). Dylan later discussed the song in an interview, saying it was “almost magically written.” Listening to it, you can’t help but believe him.
8. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
On the most lyrically complex song from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan recounts a surreal odyssey filled with apocalyptic visions that reflect the paranoia and unrest of the ‘60s. Originally written in the form of a poem, the song is populated with heartstopping imagery (“I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”) and provocative phrasing (“Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’”).
Many listeners at the time interpreted the “hard rain” in the refrain as nuclear fallout, which Dylan was quick to deny. Nevertheless, the song was soon adopted as an anthem of atomic-age anxieties, having been released in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
7. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Dylan’s final song from Bringing It All Back Home is an acoustic ballad about finality, about the impermanence of life and the unceasing march of time. Addressing the eponymous “Baby Blue,” the song warns of the changing world around them with deeply symbolic lyrics (“The vagabond who’s rapping at your door / Is standing in the clothes that you once wore”).
Although the true identity of “Baby Blue” is unclear, many Dylan experts suspect the song was written to bid farewell to his followers in the folk music scene. It’s a convincing theory, especially given that Dylan performed the song to placate the booing fans following his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
6. Desolation Row
For the closing track of Highway 61 Revisited, the second in his “electric trilogy” of rock albums, Dylan returned to his acoustic roots for a sprawling, 11-minute epic stuffed with literary, biblical and historical allusions.
From Albert Einstein and the Phantom of the Opera to Cinderella and Romeo, Dylan narrates the misadventures of an eclectic group of cultural icons — reframing them as outcasts and freaks in a carnivalesque backdrop. It’s as if Dylan is inviting us to step inside America’s cultural subconscious and see it for what it really is (“Everybody is making love / Or else expecting rain”).
5. Girl from the North Country
Now the name of a successful Broadway musical, this heartrending love song is one of many standout tracks from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Featuring some of Dylan’s most painterly imagery (“If you go when the snowflakes storm / When the rivers freeze and summer ends”), the song recounts a lost love frozen in time.
The romance at the heart of the song comes into focus like a still life — a thing of beauty in stasis, forever unchanging. The longing in Dylan’s voice is palpable, the beauty of his words pairing perfectly with the song’s gentle melody, which was inspired by traditional English ballads. Dylan would later re-record the song as a duet with Johnny Cash, but the original 1963 recording will always be the definitive version.
4. The Times They Are A-Changin’
Perhaps Dylan’s most transparent protest song, the title track from his socially conscious third album is also one of his most enduring. Taken up as an anthem of change and progress, the song warns older generations to heed the call of their children as a new world is being built (“Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command”).
“The Times They Are A-Changin’” is synonymous with the turbulence of the 1960s (it was released mere months following President Kennedy's assassination), but its message continues to be felt to this day. Both urgent and earnest, Dylan’s signature song of protest is also a song of eternal hope.
3. Mr. Tambourine Man
One of Dylan’s most widely covered songs, this lyrically abstract ode to imagination and day-dreaming gave the Byrds a chart-topping hit, but the original recording that appears on Bringing It All Back Home reigns supreme.
Dylan weaves together vivid, hallucinogenic images that effectively bridged the folk music scene with the burgeoning psychedelic era of the mid-'60s (“Then take me disappearing through the smoke-rings of my mind / Down the foggy ruins of time”). Dylan’s writing was rarely more elegant than on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the depth of his words creeping up on you when you least expect it (“Let me forget about today until tomorrow”).
2. Blowin’ in the Wind
“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” It’s hard to believe that a white folk singer from the northern countryside of Minnesota could have written something so profoundly moving and central to the lived experience of Black Americans. And yet, barely into his 20s, Dylan penned one of the greatest anthems of the Civil Rights movement, a song that took him from the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Molding the melody from an African American spiritual, Dylan structures the song as a series of rhetorical questions, which he answers with the now-iconic refrain (“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”). The open-ended nature of Dylan’s lyrics are ambiguous yet hopeful, suggesting that the solutions to equality may be right in front of us — even as they seem impossible to grasp.
1. Like a Rolling Stone
“Like a Rolling Stone” had everything going against it on its way to becoming a worldwide hit. Its raucous electric sound was considered too heavy, Dylan’s vocal delivery too cynical, his lyrics too weird. And clocking in at six minutes, the song was too long to have any success on the radio.
Except it did.
With “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan redrew the boundaries of American popular music. Laid over a jangling guitar and an infectiously-catchy organ riff, the song dresses down a former socialite named “Miss Lonely,” whose fall from grace lands her on the bottom rung of society’s ladder. In the song’s chorus, Dylan asks her, “How does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown?” It’s a question Dylan evidently knows all too well, having lived the life of a traveling troubadour, a world-famous rock star and everything in between.
