Bob Dylan – The Best of Bob Dylan Vol. 2 Review

Any compilation worth the time to listen should show off a little. A surprise here or there, a leftfield choice to keep a listener on their toes. If it were to be any artist capable of doing that, it’d be the team putting together one of the many, seemingly endless Bob Dylan compilations. The Best of Bob Dylan Vol. 2 asks one simple question. What if the best of Dylan’s work included an alternate version of Dignity, a song from Street-Legal, and a live version of Highlands only available to those who found a bonus CD copy? Truly the minds of villainy are at play here, but it makes all the difference on The Best of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, a courageous compilation which does away with the notion that Dylan stopped making worthwhile work in 1977. This is a collection of songs which are otherwise overlooked or, as is the case for the likes of Things Have Changed and Not Dark Yet, new enough at the time of release to warrant being safe bets as future classics. These compilers were right about both.  

Opening the compilation with Things Have Changed is a chance to position Dylan as an Academy Award-winner, not just as a hailed and acclaimed songwriter. He has checked all the boxes and done it all. Here is the song that encapsulates that. It’s also a handbrake turn from the compilation team, who take Things Have Changed and that gruff, stylish vocal range, and pair it immediately with A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. It works as a song to follow up on that at-the-time contemporary sound. What a pairing it makes, and it proves to be the transition needed to get from one vocal range to the other. What follows is your usual slate of Dylan classics. It Ain’t Me Babe, Highway 61 Revisited, and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. But look at those omissions. Notable the lack of Desolation Row, All Along the Watchtower, and Mr Tambourine Man may be, it’s a commendable absence. Those songs are represented by other choices, and the alternative suggestions found here are arguably correct choices.  

Those listening to a second volume Dylan compilation should give their heads a shake, anyway. Of course those hits are on the first instalment, but what purpose is there to hammering out a second best of compilation when, just a month prior, there had been The Essential Bob Dylan? Things have changed, indeed. Money changes hands and the backlog of songs at the disposal of any artist is free to be picked through by just about anyone at the label. There is a staggering volume to the compilations in Dylan’s discography. Unfortunately, he set a precedent in the 1970s as these compilations being a place where he may release new and underrated material. Throwing When I Paint My Masterpiece and I Shall Be Released onto the back-end of Greatest Hits Vol. II is enough to confuse and delight in equal measure.  

But aside from live versions of Blowin’ in the Wind and Highlands, as well as the bold inclusion of License to Kill on an album declaring these to be the best Dylan songs around from a period of critical indifference, there isn’t much to The Best of Bob Dylan Vol. 2. An alternate version of Forever Young that previously appeared on Biograph is made available. That’s about it for this, though. A sincere notion is at play, and that makes all the difference when it comes to bootleg materials. Worth a poke around just to remember it exists and that it, a sequel to The Best of Bob Dylan, came just after the release of The Essential Bob Dylan. It’s a game of synonyms for the Dylan team. Who’d have thought just fifteen years later and there’d be a mess of YouTube playlists and these compilation efforts to deal with.