Slow Train Coming
melancholic,
Slow Train Coming is one of my favorite Dylan albums. Here's Dylan passing through his period of, of all things, his bible studies. He fell in love with Jesus or whatever, got something out of it that some of his listeners don't appreciate or will ridicule - but I always felt there was great sincerity to every one of these songs. (When he sings "I believe in You!" I believe he meant it earnestly at the time even though his Christianity was only a passing phase.) The album as a whole is full of spiritual longing and searching, so Dylan must have felt that he needed some answers and he found some here, and later went through a gospel period as well.
Overall in Slow Train... there's intensity, a bit of whimsy ('Man Gave Names...'), and something prophetic about where the human species is headed. (I agree with him: there's a slow train of reckoning coming 'round the bend for humanity.) I also like the line where he gets into the fire and brimstone of "fathers turning their daughters into whores," a metaphor for the false materialism of the age; and it's true that we all have "to serve somebody," a song about choice in life.
For me, Dylan has the same creative genius that he always had, though this album was rejected by the public anyway. It was a concept project that held together beautifully if one can accept where he was coming from spiritually. It still remains of my favorites -- full of his usual truths about life but set in a dramatically different context or taken from a religious angle -- or perhaps more apt, taken creatively from a dramatically different angel.