4. Bob DylanHighway 61 Revisited

I don’t hear the ‘old school’ in that record. I love this record because of the moments where there are hints of it on Bringing It All Back Home. There are some great songs there, but it still sounds like an electric folk record. This record is something completely different.

Even though Dylan’s work will always be based around the Chicago blues, he was able to make it into something else which is purely his own. For me, it’s a timing thing. I grew up with a copy of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volumes one and two – maybe my parents had bought it – but we didn’t have his other records and I didn’t really think that much about Dylan until I started writing my own songs. ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ takes its source material and twists it just enough that it’s almost pop. It’s almost blues. But it’s none of those things. It’s just basically Bob Dylan.

The first time I really appreciated the album may have been in the flat of the woman in the song ‘Charlotte Street’. She used to play that record, and to be honest, I only just remembered that this second.