for a prolific songwriter who up to that point had a pretty rock-solid catalog despite at least three about-faces up to that point, it certainly represented some of the signs of a willfully induced career suicidial tendencies or at the very least a lack of inspiration/writer's-block.

I won't put it in the Metal Machine Music category (where people actually had to debate whether it actually *was* music & the logic/explanation behind it seems to only point to Lou Reed being a Legendary Asshole) but it's at least in the same category of 'Am I Not Your Girl?' by Sinead O'Connor in that even if it does possess some okay musical moments they falls on deaf ears in the context of which it was released & the artist's prior recorded history.

The vocals are a bit all over the place on that album, probably because there's different eras/places for the source material.

Having the best-remembered song on here be one Dylan doesn't even sing on (featuring a repeated mantra of 'all work & no play makes jack a dull boy' proverbial proportions) speaks to the issues with this album probably more than anything else.

Dylan had at least five or six distinct singing voices to my ears up to that point (that early Ramblin Jack type of folky-hick 'humdinger/folksinger' affectation, the more shouted/accusatory tone taken during the subsequent 'topical' phase around 63/64, the endless-verses with elongated-syllable-ending 'rocker' of Rolling Stone once he went electric, the muted-dust-bowl-narrative-sound of John Wesley Harding, the oddly crystal-clear country-crooner of Nashville Skyline for which his only explanation was a brief respite from incessant cigarrette-smoking) but this one seems almost somewhere in the middle of the last two I'd mentioned but with less emotional investment.