Nashville Skyline is ridiculously short 10 songs, 27 minutes. But this concentration of melody and feeling you can (usually) not escape. It's kind of 'country-pop album' that works even after 40 years. A plate like a good friend who was always there and will always be there. A masterpiece just that blends seamlessly into Dylan's number of its milestones.
Bob Dylan and Johnny CashBeginnend with the dreamlike duet Girl From The North Country (with his friend Johnny Cash), 'floats' album formally over soulful country ballads and loose uptempo songs up to the serene melancholy Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You. Moreover Nashville contains one of the biggest hits of the songwriter from Minnesota: Lay Lady Lay reached in the US 7th place on the Billboard charts and can certainly be described as one of Dylan's countless classics. The song was originally conceived as soundtrack for the drama Midnight Cowboy provided (including with Dustin Hoffman), but Dylan gave the piece from not timely.
Apart from the instrumental Nashville Skyline Rag actually every song on the album a hit. And even if the critics then and now do not quite agree on how to deal with Nashville Skyline, but one thing remains to be determined: This is the last four decades, a country album to enjoy - and when a piece of music can afford it, has it's purpose more than fulfilled.
