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:
“It is the business of the critic, as of the portrait painter, to synthesize a million glances at his subject that will tell the onlooker at one glance the truth about him, as ultimate as he can get it.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)