'All the Tired Horses'

It’s one of rock criticism’s most famous lines: “What is this s—?” So began Greil Marcus’ review of Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait. The same could be asked of the record’s opening track, which consists of two lines — “All the tired horses in the sun/ How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm” — repeated over and over again by a group of female singers for just about three minutes. The singing is hypnotic enough to lure sailors to their deaths, and the instrumentation is pleasant enough. But Dylan’s nowhere to be seen, obviously. So forget this song.
'Sarah Jane'

A track off the 1973 album Dylan, “Sarah Jane” is a terribly produced song — it sounds as if Bob Dylan’s singing into a microphone that is sitting all the way on the other side of the studio. But there’s a chance that the song sounds bad on purpose. When the singer jumped shipped from Columbia Records, the label pasted together subpar outtakes from two other records (mostly covers of tunes like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Mr. Bojangles”) and released them on a record presumptuously titled Dylan. Whether or not it was payback for Dylan’s abandonment, we cannot say. And though “Sarah Jane” is the only noncover song on the album, we bet the songwriter wishes he could pass it off as someone else’s composition.

























