Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home was recorded across three days in January 1965 at Columbia's Studio A in New York and released that March, and it is remembered above all for the split down its middle. Side one is a full electric rock band, guitars, keyboards, bass, and drums backing Dylan on songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Maggie's Farm." Side two returns to just Dylan, an acoustic guitar, and harmonica, with only occasional understated electric coloring from guitarist Bruce Langhorne.

That structure was not a marketing gimmick so much as an honest snapshot of where Dylan stood. He had spent three albums as the folk movement's most celebrated songwriter, and by 1964 was already drifting toward more personal, less overtly political material, a shift that provoked public criticism from within the folk community itself. Bringing It All Back Home let both versions of Dylan coexist on one record before the fuller, more public rupture that came a few months later at the Newport Folk Festival, where his electric set was met with booing from parts of the crowd.

Side two closes with "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," the longest and among the darkest songs Dylan had written to that point, alongside "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Gates of Eden," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Together those four acoustic tracks trade the direct political address of Dylan's earlier protest songs for something more interior and prophetic.

Contemporary folk purists were unsettled by the record's electric half, but critical opinion reversed quickly and has stayed reversed. Retrospective reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and the album is widely credited, alongside The Byrds' contemporaneous cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man," with helping invent folk rock as a genre, influencing acts from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones to Simon and Garfunkel. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006.