Self Portrait (Bob Dylan Album)
Self Portrait is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in June 1970 by Columbia Records.
Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions. Most of the album is sung in the affected country crooning voice that Dylan had introduced a year earlier on Nashville Skyline. Seen by some as intentionally surreal and even satirical at times, Self Portrait received extremely poor reviews upon release; Greil Marcus' opening sentence in his Rolling Stone review was: "What is this shit?"
Dylan has claimed in interviews that Self Portrait was something of a joke, far below the standards he set in the 1960s, and was made to get people off his back and end the "spokesman of a generation" tags.
Despite the negative reception, the album quickly went gold in the US, where it hit #4, and it gave Dylan yet another UK #1 hit before it fell down the charts.
Read more about Self Portrait (Bob Dylan Album): Production, Songs, Aftermath, Track Listing, Charts, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words portrait and/or dylan:
“I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)