Hard Rain - by Tim Riley (Paperback)

About the Book

Ranging over 30 years of albums and outtakes, bootleg recordings, films, and live concerts, Riley delivers fresh analyses of Bob Dylan's songs, charts the mercurial shifts in the Dylan persona, assesses the singer's debt to earlier musicians, and reveals the shadow he casts on the work of Springsteen and others.

Book Synopsis

An in-depth look at over thirty years of Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's recordings including analysis of "The Times They Are A-Changing," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "Tangled Up in Blue."

Examinging over thirty years of Dylan's recordings, films, and live concerts to deliver fresh, and sometimes heretical, judgements of his work, Tim Riley persuasively demonstrates that Bob Dylan is the most important American rock 'n' roller since Elvis. He charts the mercurial shifts of the Dylan persona, from acoustic to electric, and assesses the singer's debt to earlier muscians aw well as his influence on such performers as the Byrds, Bruce Springsteen, and Elvis Costello.

Includes a new epilogue that examines Dylan's 30th anniversary celebration and his 1998 Grammy Award comeback.

Review Quotes

"A book that allows us to understand exactly why Bob Dylan is so celebrated . . . Riley ponders the lyrics, arrangements, and delivery of Dylan's work, from his first album in 1962." --Los Angeles Times

"Finally, in Tim Riley, Dylan has a critic who can at once place him in the Woody Guthrie toubadour tradition and probe the music knowingly." --BookPage

"Riley succeeds in making familiar materical seem fresh . . . . He offers many new, thought-provoking interpretations of songs, and his powers of description are potent." --Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

Tim Riley is the author of Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, Hard Rain, Fever, and John Ono Lennon: The Music and the Life. He has written for Slate and Newsweek, and reviews music for NPR. A professor of journalism at Emerson College, he lives in Concord, Massachusetts.