Yes­ter­day, whilst sat hav­ing a cof­fee in my local (to the office) Java Cafe Bar, they were play­ing Desire by Bob Dylan. Wow! It must be more than 20 years since I’d heard that album. I real­ised I still knew all the lyr­ics too (I used to listen to it a lot). Or at least the lyr­ics to the three or four tracks I heard whilst drink­ing my cof­fee. I also remembered, even­tu­ally, that the haunt­ing violin work was by Scar­let Rivi­era, and back­ing vocals by Emmylou Har­ris!
After I found myself still singing snatches of the songs today, I real­ised two things: One, I rarely hear songs which tell a story these days, and pretty much every song on that album tells a story; and two, I really need to go buy a copy!
Desire was the first con­tem­por­ary album I listened too. Back in 1975 (I think) when it was a new release, my sis­ter Carole’s boy­friend, Mike, left a copy at our house. I listened to it over and over again. Prior to that the only LPs (12 inch vinyl records to you young­sters) I had access to were Carole’s Elvis albums, my Mum’s Perry Como, Andy Wil­li­ams, and Frank Sinatra albums, and my Dad’s John Den­ver col­lec­tion. All good ground­ing for appre­ci­at­ing tal­en­ted sing­ers, but Desire was some­thing else entirely. Later Mike also left a copy of Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tiller­man, another great album I no longer own.