1960s

In the winter of 1961 Dylan moved to New York and began to play in the burgeoning folk music scene of Greenwich Village. That same year he was signed to Columbia Records and released his debut album Bob Dylan in 1962. This was followed in quick succession by The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) that revealed the voice of a powerful new songwriter and included the songs ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, and Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964), that reflected such diverse influences as the Beat poets, French symbolists, and the Delta blues. Bringing It All Back Home (1965) including ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, followed. This was the first of three records that changed the perception of Dylan as a folk and protest artist, and shook popular

1970s

The release of the album New Morning (1970) marked Dylan’s return to form. In 1973 Dylan took a small part in Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid for which he wrote the sound track that included the chart-topping song ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’. The following year Dylan reunited with his former backing group, The Band, for a tour of North America, and in 1975 put together The Rolling Thunder Revue, a concert series of friends, poets, filmmakers and playwrights that performed mostly in small theatres across northeastern America.

1980s

The 1980s saw Dylan receive awards and honours in recognition of his contribution to music that included an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1982) and the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Bruce Springsteen (1988). He was also awarded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Founders Award (1986) which is given to songwriters and composers for pioneering contributions to music.

Album releases during the decade included Infidels (1983), an eclectic album co-produced with guitar legend Mark Knopfler, featuring the reggae rhythm section of Sly and Robbie; Dylan & The Dead, the live album of stadium concerts performed by Dylan and the Grateful Dead in 1987, and Oh Mercy produced in New Orleans, USA (1989).

1990s

During 1991 Columbia Records released the first three volumes of an ongoing series of archival releases, entitled The Bootleg Series. In 1992 Dylanreturned to his folk roots with his first solo acoustic album in 30 years, Good As I Been To You and in 1993 another album of acoustic folk music, World Gone Wrong.Towards the end of the decade Dylan released Time Out Of Mind (1997), a critical and commercial success containing ‘Make You Feel My Love’, which in 1998received three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

2000s

In early 2001 Dylan received the Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture for ‘Things Have Changed’, written in 2000 for the film Wonder Boys. Critically acclaimed album releases followed, including Love And Theft (2001); Modern Times (2006), Dylan’s first American number-one album in 30 years; Together Through Life (2009), number one in both the USA and the UK; and Christmas In The Heart, Dylan’s first collection of Christmas songs.

2010s

Dylan continued to expand and diversify his visual art throughout the 2010s, creating several new series that were exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide: The Brazil Series premiered at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2010; The Asia Series and Revisionist Art at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, USA in 2011 and 2012 respectively; The New Orleans Series at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy in 2013, which travelled onto the New Orleans Museum of Art, USA in 2016; and Face Value at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK in 2013 that toured to the Museum of National History, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2014. Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum, the most comprehensive exhibition of Dylan’s artwork to date, opened at Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China in 2019.

2020s

Dylan has been performing around 100 shows a year around the world since 1988. When the tour was put on hold in early 2020, Dylan used the rare hiatus to focus more time on welding and painting, as revealed in an interview with the New York Times.