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The opening track, “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)“, was originally recorded for 1983’s Infidels under the title “Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart” (eventually released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991). It was re-written and re-recorded several times before finding its way on to Empire Burlesque. A lushly produced pop song riding a reggae groove courtesy of Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar (better known as Sly & Robbie), the love song was singled out as the best track on the album by the most recent edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide. The track, which features Mick Taylor on guitar (from Dylan’s 84 Tour), was also chosen as the first single for Empire Burlesque.

Clinton Heylin describes “Seeing the Real You at Last” as “a compendium of images half remembered from Hollywood movies,” as many of the lyrics made “allusions to Humphrey Bogart movies, Shane, even Clint Eastwood‘s Bronco Billy.”

The love ballad, “I’ll Remember You” was still played in concert until 2005, more so than all but one other song from Empire Burlesque. It was also featured, in an acoustic version, in the movie Masked & Anonymous, though not included on the released soundtrack.

“Clean-Cut Kid” was another song recorded during the Infidels sessions. The lyrics weren’t finished until much later, and the finished result was included on Empire Burlesque. In the interim Bob gave the song to Carla Olson of the Textones as a thank you for her appearing in his first-ever video, Sweetheart Like You. She included it on the Textones’ debut album Midnight Mission and Ry Cooder was featured on slide guitar. A novelty song wrapped around sharp political commentary, the ‘clean-cut kid’ is an average American kid who’s radically altered by his experience in the Vietnam War. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau praised it as “the toughest Vietnam-vet song yet.”

When members of the press, as well as Dylan’s own fans, dubbed Empire Burlesque as ‘Disco Dylan,’ it was mainly for the song “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.” An evocative song filled with apocalyptic imagery, it was originally an upbeat, piledriving rocker recorded with Steven Van Zandt and Roy Bittan, both members of Bruce Springsteen‘s E Street Band. Unsatisfied with the recording, Dylan and Baker radically recast the song as a contemporary dance track. (The earlier version was later released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.)

The penultimate song, “Something’s Burning, Baby”, is another song filled with apocalyptic imagery. A slow-building march accented with synthesizers, it was singled out by biographer Clinton Heylin as the strongest track on Empire Burlesque: “An ominous tale set to a slow march beat, [it] was a welcome reminder of his ongoing preoccupations with that dreadful day.”

“Dark Eyes” features only Dylan on guitar and harmonica. According to earlier interviews and Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles, it was written virtually on demand when Arthur Baker suggested something simpler for the album’s final track. Dylan liked the idea of closing the album with a stark, acoustic track, particularly when the rest of the album was so heavily produced. However, Dylan didn’t have an appropriate song. He returned to his hotel in Manhattan after midnight, and according to Dylan:

“As I stepped out of the elevator, a call girl was coming toward me in the hallway—pale yellow hair wearing a fox coat—high heeled shoes that could pierce your heart. She had blue circles around her eyes, black eyeliner, dark eyes. She looked like she’d been beaten up and was afraid that she’d get beat up again. In her hand, crimson purple wine in a glass. ‘I’m just dying for a drink,’ she said as she passed me in the hall. She had a beautifulness, but not for this kind of world.”

The brief, chance encounter inspired Dylan to write “Dark Eyes,” which was quickly recorded without any studio embellishment. Structured like a children’s song, with very rudimentary guitar work and very simple notes, it’s often quoted for its last chorus: “A million faces at my feet, but all I see are dark eyes.”

A number of critics have noted the bizarre sources of inspiration behind some of the songs. As mentioned, some lines were lifted from old Humphrey Bogart pictures, but at least a few were taken from the sci-fi television show, Star Trek. Author Clinton Heylin wrote that “one of the best couplets—”I’ll go along with the charade / Until I can think my way out’ (from “Tight Connection to My Heart”)—actually comes verbatim from a Star Trek episode, ‘Squire of Gothos’.” Some then say this line was originally used in the Humphrey Bogart movie Sahara, but it was not.

Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music is incalculable. As a
songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting,
from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory,
stream-of-conscious narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the
notions that in order to perform, a singer had to have a conventionally
good voice, thereby redefining the role of vocalist in popular music.
As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including
electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the
tip of his achievements. Dylan’s force was evident during his height of
popularity in the ’60s — the Beatles’ shift toward introspective
songwriting in the mid-’60s never would have happened without him —
but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations.
Many of his songs became popular standards, and his best albums were
undisputed classics of the rock roll canon. Dylan’s influence
throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal
turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre
moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Even
when his sales declined in the ’80s and ’90s, Dylan’s presence was
calculable.

For a figure of such substantial influence, Dylan
came from humble beginnings. Born in Duluth, MN, Bob Dylan (b. Robert
Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) was raised in Hibbing, MN, from the age
of six. As a child he learned how to play guitar and harmonica, forming
a rock roll band called the Golden Chords when he was in high school.
Following his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. While at college, he began
performing folk songs at coffeehouses under the name Bob Dylan, taking
his last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Already inspired by Hank
Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan began listening to blues while at
college, and the genre weaved its way into his music. Dylan spent the
summer of 1960 in Denver, where he met bluesman Jesse Fuller, the
inspiration behind the songwriter’s signature harmonica rack and
guitar. By the time he returned to Minneapolis in the fall, he had
grown substantially as a performer and was determined to become a
professional musician.

Dylan made his way to New York City in
January of 1961, immediately making a substantial impression on the
folk community of Greenwich Village. He began visiting his idol Guthrie
in the hospital, where he was slowly dying from Huntington’s chorea.
Dylan also began performing in coffeehouses, and his rough charisma won
him a significant following. In April, he opened for John Lee Hooker at
~Gerde’s Folk City. Five months later, Dylan performed another concert
at the venue, which was reviewed positively by Robert Shelton in the

-New
York Times. Columbia AR man John Hammond sought out Dylan on the
strength of the review, and signed the songwriter in the fall of 1961.
Hammond produced Dylan’s eponymous debut album (released in March
1962), a collection of folk and blues standards that boasted only two
original songs. Over the course of 1962, Dylan began to write a large
batch of original songs, many of which were political protest songs in
the vein of his Greenwich contemporaries. These songs were showcased on
his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Before its release,
Freewheelin’ went through several incarnations. Dylan had recorded a
rock roll single, “Mixed Up Confusion,” at the end of 1962, but his
manager, Albert Grossman, made sure the record was deleted because he
wanted to present Dylan as an acoustic folky. Similarly, several tracks
with a full backing band that were recorded for Freewheelin’ were
scrapped before the album’s release. Furthermore, several tracks
recorded for the album — including “Talking John Birch Society Blues”
— were eliminated from the album before its release.

Comprised
entirely of original songs, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan made a huge
impact in the U.S. folk community, and many performers began covering
songs from the album. Of these, the most significant were Peter, Paul
Mary, who made “Blowin’ in the Wind” into a huge pop hit in the summer
of 1963 and thereby made Bob Dylan into a recognizable household name.
On the strength of Peter, Paul Mary’s cover and his opening gigs for
popular folky Joan Baez, Freewheelin’ became a hit in the fall of 1963,
climbing to number 23 on the charts. By that point, Baez and Dylan had
become romantically involved, and she was beginning to record his songs
frequently. Dylan was writing just as fast, and was performing hundreds
of concerts a year.

By the time The Times They Are A-Changin’
was released in early 1964, Dylan’s songwriting had developed far
beyond that of his New York peers. Heavily inspired by poets like
Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats, his writing took on a more literate and
evocative quality. Around the same time, he began to expand his musical
boundaries, adding more blues and RB influences to his songs. Released
in the summer of 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan made these changes
evident. However, Dylan was moving faster than his records could
indicate. By the end of 1964, he had ended his romantic relationship
with Baez and had begun dating a former model named Sara Lowndes, whom
he subsequently married. Simultaneously, he gave the Byrds “Mr.
Tambourine Man” to record for their debut album. the Byrds gave the
song a ringing, electric arrangement, but by the time the single became
a hit, Dylan was already exploring his own brand of folk-rock. Inspired
by the British Invasion, particularly the Animals’ version of “House of
the Rising Sun,” Dylan recorded a set of original songs backed by a
loud rock roll band for his next album. While Bringing It All Back Home
(March 1965) still had a side of acoustic material, it made clear that
Dylan had turned his back on folk music. For the folk audience, the
true breaking point arrived a few months after the album’s release,
when he played ~the Newport Folk Festival supported by the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band. The audience greeted him with vicious derision,
but he had already been accepted by the growing rock roll community.
Dylan’s spring tour of Britain was the basis for D.A. Pennebaker’s
documentary Don’t Look Back, a film that captures the songwriter’s edgy
charisma and charm.

Dylan made his breakthrough to the pop
audience in the summer of 1965, when “Like a Rolling Stone” became a
number two hit. Driven by a circular organ riff and a steady beat, the
six-minute single broke the barrier of the three-minute pop single.
Dylan became the subject of innumerable articles, and his lyrics became
the subject of literary analyses across the U.S. and U.K. Well over 100
artists covered his songs between 1964 and 1966; the Byrds and the
Turtles, in particular, had big hits with his compositions. Highway 61
Revisited, his first full-fledged rock roll album, became a Top Ten hit
shortly after its summer 1965 release. “Positively 4th Street” and
“Rainy Day Women 12 35” became Top Ten hits in the fall of 1965 and
spring of 1966, respectively. Following the May 1966 release of the
double-album Blonde on Blonde, he had sold over ten million records
around the world.

During the fall of 1965, Dylan hired the Hawks,
formerly Ronnie Hawkins’ backing group, as his touring band. the Hawks,
who changed their name to the Band in 1968, would become Dylan’s most
famous backing band, primarily because of their intuitive chemistry and
“wild, thin mercury sound,” but also because of their British tour in
the spring of 1966. The tour was the first time Britain had heard the
electric Dylan, and their reaction was disagreeable and violent. At the
tour’s Royal Albert Hall concert, generally acknowledged to have
occurred in Manchester, an audience member called Dylan “Judas,”
inspiring a positively vicious version of “Like a Rolling Stone” from
the Band. The performance was immortalized on countless bootleg albums
(an official release finally surfaced in 1998), and it indicates the
intensity of Dylan in the middle of 1966. He had assumed control of
Pennebaker’s second Dylan documentary, Eat the Document, and was under
deadline to complete his book -Tarantula, as well as record a new
record. Following the British tour, he returned to America.

On
July 29, 1966, he was injured in a motorcycle accident outside of his
home in Woodstock, NY, suffering injuries to his neck vertebrae and a
concussion. Details of the accident remain elusive — he was reportedly
in critical condition for a week and had amnesia — and some
biographers have questioned its severity, but the event was a pivotal
turning point in his career. After the accident, Dylan became a
recluse, disappearing into his home in Woodstock and raising his family
with his wife, Sara. After a few months, he retreated with the Band to
a rented house, subsequently dubbed Big Pink, in West Saugerties to
record a number of demos. For several months, Dylan and the Band
recorded an enormous amount of material, ranging from old folk,
country, and blues songs to newly written originals. The songs
indicated that Dylan’s songwriting had undergone a metamorphosis,
becoming streamlined and more direct. Similarly, his music had changed,
owing less to traditional rock roll, and demonstrating heavy country,
blues, and traditional folk influences. None of the Big Pink recordings
were intended to be released, but tapes from the sessions were
circulated by Dylan’s music publisher with the intent of generating
cover versions. Copies of these tapes, as well as other songs, were
available on illegal bootleg albums by the end of the ’60s; it was the
first time that bootleg copies of unreleased recordings became widely
circulated. Portions of the tapes were officially released in 1975 as
the double-album The Basement Tapes.

While Dylan was in
seclusion, rock roll had become heavier and artier in the wake of the
psychedelic revolution. When Dylan returned with John Wesley Harding in
December of 1967, its quiet, country ambience was a surprise to the
general public, but it was a significant hit, peaking at number two in
the U.S. and number one in the U.K. Furthermore, the record arguably
became the first significant country-rock record to be released,
setting the stage for efforts by the Byrds and the Flying Burrito
Brothers later in 1969. Dylan followed his country inclinations on his
next album, 1969’s Nashville Skyline, which was recorded in Nashville
with several of the country industry’s top session men. While the album
was a hit, spawning the Top Ten single “Lay Lady Lay,” it was
criticized in some quarters for uneven material. The mixed reception
was the beginning of a full-blown backlash that arrived with the
double-album Self Portrait. Released early in June of 1970, the album
was a hodgepodge of covers, live tracks, re-interpretations, and new
songs greeted with negative reviews from all quarters of the press.
Dylan followed the album quickly with New Morning, which was hailed as
a comeback.

Following the release of New Morning, Dylan began to
wander restlessly. In 1969 or 1970, he moved back to Greenwich Village,
published -Tarantula for the first time in November of 1970, and
performed at ~the Concert for Bangladesh. During 1972, he began his
acting career by playing Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid, which was released in 1973. He also wrote the soundtrack for
the film, which featured “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” his biggest hit
since “Lay Lady Lay.” The Pat Garrett soundtrack was the final record
released under his Columbia contract before he moved to David Geffen’s
fledgling Asylum Records. As retaliation, Columbia assembled Dylan, a
collection of Self Portrait outtakes, for release at the end of 1973.
Dylan only recorded two albums — including 1974’s Planet Waves,
coincidentally his first number one album — before he moved back to
Columbia. the Band supported Dylan on Planet Waves and its accompanying
tour, which became the most successful tour in rock roll history; it
was captured on 1974’s double-live album Before the Flood.

Dylan’s
1974 tour was the beginning of a comeback culminated by 1975’s Blood on
the Tracks. Largely inspired by the disintegration of his marriage,
Blood on the Tracks was hailed as a return to form by critics and it
became his second number one album. After jamming with folkies in
Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to launch a gigantic tour, loosely

based on traveling medicine shows. Lining up an extensive list of
supporting musicians — including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Rambling
Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, and poet Allen
Ginsberg — Dylan dubbed the tour ~the Rolling Thunder Revue and set
out on the road in the fall of 1975. For the next year, ~the Rolling
Thunder Revue toured on and off, with Dylan filming many of the
concerts for a future film. During the tour, Desire was released to
considerable acclaim and success, spending five weeks on the top of the
charts. Throughout ~the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan showcased
“Hurricane,” a protest song he had written about boxer Rubin Carter,
who had been unjustly imprisoned for murder. The live album Hard Rain
was released at the end of the tour. Dylan released Renaldo and Clara,
a four-hour film based on the ~Rolling Thunder tour, to poor reviews in
early 1978.

Early in 1978, Dylan set out on another extensive
tour, this time backed by a band that resembled a Las Vegas lounge
band. The group was featured on the 1978 album Street Legal and the
1979 live album At Budokan. At the conclusion of the tour in late 1978,
Dylan announced that he was a born-again Christian, and he launched a
series of Christian albums that following summer with Slow Train
Coming. Though the reviews were mixed, the album was a success, peaking
at number three and going platinum. His supporting tour for Slow Train
Coming featured only his new religious material, much to the bafflement
of his long-term fans. Two other religious albums — Saved (1980) and
Shot of Love (1981) — followed, both to poor reviews. In 1982, Dylan
traveled to Israel, sparking rumors that his conversion to Christianity
was short-lived. He returned to secular recording with 1983’s Infidels,
which was greeted with favorable reviews.

Dylan returned to
performing in 1984, releasing the live album Real Live at the end of
the year. Empire Burlesque followed in 1985, but its odd mix of dance
tracks and rock roll won few fans. However, the five-album/triple-disc
retrospective box set Biograph appeared that same year to great
acclaim. In 1986, Dylan hit the road with Tom Petty the Heartbreakers
for a successful and acclaimed tour, but his album that year, Knocked
Out Loaded, was received poorly. The following year, he toured with the
Grateful Dead as his backing band; two years later, the souvenir album
Dylan the Dead appeared.

In 1988, Dylan embarked on what became
known as “The Never-Ending Tour” — a constant stream of shows that ran
on and off into the late ’90s. That same year, he released Down in the
Groove, an album largely comprised of covers. The Never-Ending Tour
received far stronger reviews than Down in the Groove, but 1989’s Oh
Mercy was his most acclaimed album since 1974’s Blood on the Tracks.
However, his 1990 follow-up, Under the Red Sky, was received poorly,
especially when compared to the enthusiastic reception for the 1991 box
set The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare Unreleased), a collection of
previously unreleased outtakes and rarities.

For the remainder of
the ’90s, Dylan divided his time between live concerts and painting. In
1992, he returned to recording with Good As I Been to You, an acoustic
collection of traditional folk songs. It was followed in 1993 by
another folk album, World Gone Wrong, which won the Grammy for Best
Traditional Folk Album. After the release of World Gone Wrong, Dylan
released a greatest-hits album and a live record.

Dylan released
Time Out of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years,
in the fall of 1997. Time Out of Mind received his strongest reviews in
years and unexpectedly debuted in the Top Ten. Its success sparked a
revival of interest in Dylan — he appeared on the cover of Newsweek
and his concerts became sell-outs. Early in 1998, Time Out of Mind
received three Grammy Awards — Album of the Year, Best Contemporary
Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All
Music Guide