Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan

Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan's ninth studio album, rolled out on Columbia on April 9, 1969, and the first shock is the voice. Dylan had quit smoking for a spell, and the sandpaper sneer has melted into a soft, deliberate country croon that sounds like somebody else entirely.

John Wesley Harding had flirted with rustic sounds; this time, with Bob Johnston producing, he goes all the way into country music. The songs are simple and short on riddles, full of plain talk about love and home, and "Lay Lady Lay" purrs where the old Dylan would have snarled. Critics mostly warmed to it and the public certainly did: it gave him his fourth number-one album in Britain and went to number three in America.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.