Bob Dylan Nashville Skyline on numbered limited edition Hybrid SACD

Soft, smooth croon a dramatic change from his past

For an artist whose career is flush with enigma, myth, and disguise, Nashville Skyline still surprises more than almost any other Bob Dylan move more than four decades after its original release. Distinguished from every other Dylan album by virtue of the smooth vocal performances and simple ease, the 1969 record witnesses the icon's full-on foray into country and trailblazing of the country-rock movement that followed.

Mastered on Mobile Fidelity's world-renowned mastering system, this striking SACD version zeroes in on the shocking purity and never-again-replicated croon of Dylan's vocals. Enhanced, too, are the images associated with the calmly strummed and picked acoustic guitars and decay connected to the fading notes.

"Is it rolling, Bob?," Dylan famously queries producer Bob Johnson at the beginning of "To Be Alone With You," indicating the laissez-faire feelings that surrounded the sessions and helped yield the laidback, convivial music defining the album-arguably the most unique in the artist's vast catalog. While he dipped his toes into country waters on the preceding John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline throws its collective arms around the style in bear-hug fashion and drops any obvious folk references.

Dylan enjoys backing on the album from a crackerjack assembly of Nashville session musicians including Charlie Daniels, Marshall Grant, W.S. Holland, Charlie McCoy, Ken Buttrey, and Norman Blake. Country pros, and their respective performances, don't come any better.

Track Listing
1. Girl From the North Country
2. Nashville Skyline Rag
3. To Be Alone With You
4. I Threw It All Away
5. Peggy Day
6. Lay Lady Lay
7. One More Night
8. Tell Me That It Isn't True
9. Country Pie
10. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You