Coming off the back of the widely derided Self-Portrait (“What is this shit?” Rolling Stone’s review famously began), New Morning was heralded as a return to form upon its release in 1970. Nevertheless, it has since slipped through the cracks somewhat between since reappraised predecessors such as Nashville Skyline and the anguished genius of 1975’s Blood On The Tracks.

Perhaps much of that lies in how happy, content and damn well breezy Dylan sounds on his eleventh album. Despite its title, Day Of The Locusts is neither a biblically inspired parable, nor a reading of Nathaniel West’s anti-Hollywood satire, but simply an account of Dylan going to pick up an honorary degree from Princeton University accompanied by a stoned-out-of-his-gourd David Crosby. Revived for the Cohen’s brothers’ The Big Lebowski in the ‘90s, The Man In Me, meanwhile, finds the man responsible for writing Masters Of War and Visions of Johanna singing “la la la” for half of the first verse. Therein lies New Morning’s charm, however. It’s the sound of the greatest songwriter of the 20th century simply, and audibly, enjoying himself in a way he hadn’t done so before, or arguably since.

– Chris Catchpole