Remember When: Bob Dylan Regrouped in the ’90s with a Pair of Folk Albums

When people talk about the Bob Dylan catalog, they naturally tend to gravitate to the albums and songs that made the boldest statements. And they usually talk about his career in terms of the songs that he wrote.

But few albums were as important, in their way, to Dylan’s career than Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993)—and he didn’t write a note of those records. Let’s look back at how a bunch of old folk songs helped Dylan find his own songwriting voice again.

Not Done Yet

In 1992, a concert was held in New York City to celebrate Bob Dylan’s first 30 years in music, as luminaries from the rock world came out to pay tribute. It had the feeling at the time of a kind of farewell, if not to his career as a whole then at least to the part of it when he was a preeminent songwriter and artist.

After briefly rejuvenating his artistic fortunes with the standout 1989 album Oh Mercy, he stumbled with the bland Under the Red Sky the following year. The Never Ending Tour raged on, but the prospect of recording another album of originals didn’t appeal to him in the least. Yet his contract stipulated that he churn out some product.

That’s when he hit upon the idea of doing an album of only cover songs, something he’d never done before. (Even his self-titled debut and Self Portrait had a couple originals. The 1973 Dylan album was all covers, but that was mostly assembled without his approval.) As it turned out, he liked doing it so much, he went back to well just a year later.

Good and Wrong

Good as I Been to You, released in 1992, morphed from its original idea, as Dylan first recorded a bunch of covers with a full band. He then scrapped those recordings in favor of solo performances with acoustic guitar and vocal, fully unplugging on an album for the first time since his earliest records.

While the album didn’t sell gangbusters, it restored some of the luster to Dylan’s critical standing. Still, many worried the move to covering these time-worn songs meant he was bereft of inspiration. And those worries weren’t exactly dispelled when he came back a year later and did pretty much the same thing on World Gone Wrong.

As was the case on Good As I Been to You, Dylan once again recorded the album at his home studio with just his acoustic guitar, trusty harmonica, and world-weary vocals. And once again, the critical reception was warm. But back-to-back cover albums were pretty much unprecedented for an artist like him who had built his name on his songwriting ability.

Prelude to a Comeback

Both Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong are invigorating listens. They serve not only to showcase Dylan’s interpretive skills, but also to highlight the eternal appeal of these songs. Good as I Been to You leans into twisty story songs like “Jim Jones” and “Arthur McBride,” while World Gone Wrong features more dark-night-of-the-soul material like “Blood in My Eyes” and “Delia.”

And then: No original album releases from Dylan for four years. The excitement that he had an album in the can for 1997 was severely dampened with news of a serious illness he developed in the summer of that year. Luckily, he recovered and in September 1997, Time Out of Mind, his first album of new, original material in eight years, appeared. It took one listen to that record to know he was back in a massive way.

That album began Dylan’s songwriting rejuvenation, and that hot streak hasn’t really relented. Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong seemed to many like little more than contract-fillers when they were released. Little did we know Dylan needed to immerse himself in the classics by songwriters of old to once again find the inspiration to begin writing classics of his own.

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