Self Portrait

Self Portrait is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 8, 1970 by Columbia Records. Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions. Most of the album is sung in the affected country crooning voice that Dylan had introduced a year earlier on Nashville Skyline. Seen by some as intentionally surreal and even satirical at times, Self Portrait received extremely poor reviews upon release; Greil Marcus' opening sentence in his Rolling Stone review was: "What is this shit?" Dylan has claimed in interviews that Self Portrait was something of a joke, far below the standards he set in the 1960s, and was made to get people off his back and end the "spokesman of a generation" tags. Despite the negative reception, the album quickly went gold in the US, where it hit #4, and it gave Dylan yet another UK #1 hit before it fell down the charts. The album has since built a cult following and saw a retrospective positive re-evaluation with the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait in 2013.