Shot of Love is the twenty-first studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 10, 1981 by Columbia Records. It is considered to be Dylan’s last of a trilogy of Christian albums. Arrangements are rooted more in rock ’n’ roll, and less in gospel than Dylan’s previous album. At the time of its release, Shot of Love received mixed reviews; Paul Nelson of Rolling Stone criticised the album, though he did single out the last track “Every Grain of Sand”, as a stand-out. Shot of Love, while reaching UK #6, continued Dylan’s US commercial decline, reaching #33 during a brief chart stay. Bono of Irish band U2 described Shot of Love as one of his favourites, particularly due to Dylan’s singing ability. (More from Wikipedia)
In like manner, I don’t view the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan as a radical break from the past, but rather a natural evolution of his music. For that matter, I feel the same way about Bob Dylan’s “going electric” on his next two albums, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited; and also his Christian period in the trilogy of albums from 1979-1981: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. Bob Dylan is very much undervalued as an instrumentalist, in my judgment; his guitar playing – and his harmonica, and his work as a pianist – is so strong that I often don’t even notice whether a song is acoustic or electric. As an example, until I saw it pointed out in Wikipedia while I was researching this month’s post, I had not realized that one of my Top Ten favorite Bob Dylan songs – the last and longest track on Highway 61 Revisited, “Desolation Row” – was the only non-electric song on the album.
(May 2013)
