Best 1,000 Albums Ever
by Eric Berlin

Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home: #580 of best 1,000 albums ever!

Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home

So why is Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?

I noticed that this is the third entry out of the last four on this here best 1,000 albums ever project in which the album under discussion contains at least one song that completely shatters me and stands among my most favorite songs within a given genre.

With The Distillers’ Sing Sing Death House (#583), it’s the ferociously amazing punk track, “Sick Of It All,” and with Mos Def’s Black On Both Sides (#581), it’s the boisterous hip hop masterpiece, “Ms. Fat Booty.”

And with Bringing It All Back Home, it’s the all-time classic rock song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

It was among the first Dylan songs that truly got my attention when I was in high school, a time period in which I was looking to find my own identity in classic rock (and apart from the hair metal scene that was Ascendant around that time). There’s something so innately catchy, rhythmic, driving, and compelling about “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the clever phrases and rhymes piling upon one another in such a delightful way.

It’s still fun trying to discern the meaning behind lines such as “Girl by the whirlpool’s looking for a new fool” and “The pump won’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles” but then at the same time, lines like “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” ring out as timeless anthems.  

And over a decade and a half before MTV debuted, the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video remains one of the best I’ve ever seen: dead simple and dead perfect.

And then we get to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which is flat out one of the most famous songs of the 20th Century. I don’t have the same kind of love for it as I do for “Subterranean,” but I find it beautiful and compelling to this day.

“Maggie’s Farm” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” are yet additional classics on Bringing It All Back Home, but I prefer songs like the lovely, jangling “She Belongs to Me” and the loose and rocking blues of “Outlaw Blues.”

Also see:

Some stats & info about Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home

  • What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Folk Rock, Blues Rock, Singer Songwriter, Rock & Roll, Folk
  • Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #181
  • All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
  • When was Bringing It All Back Home released? 1965
  • My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #580 out of 1,000

Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home on Spotify

A lyrical snippet from Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe

Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine. I’m on the pavement, thinkin’ about the government.

What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?

Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.

But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.