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:
“Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called “self-interestedness.” This was not a portrait of man “warts and all.” It was all wart.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“Sailin’ ‘round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)