One significant highlight of the past seven days was calculating a formula that tells me exactly where each of Bob Dylan’s 39 studio albums lies in relation to the others…
The raw data for my Every Dylan Album formula comes from a personal rating, on a five point scale, of every Dylan song.
- SKIPPER. I’d skip this song more times than not. Actively unpleasant.
- FILLER. I’d probably leave this song on, but might skip. Unmoved either way.
- BOPPER. This song would get me moving pleasantly and possibly singing along.
- BANGER. I’d be singing by now. A thoroughly enjoyable experience (the song, not my singing).
- KILLER. My life would not be the same without this song. I’d stop what I’m doing to listen and probably rewind when it gets to the end.
WARNING: This scale can only represent my feelings about a song at a particular moment in time. It excludes one very important category: the GROWER.
One example of a Dylan grower is Make You Feel My Love, from Time Out Of Mind. It’s as slushy as you would guess from the title and, until the summer of 2011, was a firm skipper.
Then Adele’s cover of the song came on the cafe radio as I sat waiting for breakfast, utterly exhausted from one of my first bivvies, a long way from home with a long road ahead of me, a couple of weeks after a painful break up. The tears rolled into my sausage and beans. Now it’s an easy banger.
The Secret Formula
I’m tempted to tell you that the Colonel’s formula is top secret, but it’s the first time I’ve ever used the LARGE function (proud!) so here it is in full:
=SUMPRODUCT(LARGE(($'All Songs'.D$2:$'All Songs'.D$1000=B2)*($'All Songs'.H$2:$'All Songs'.H$1000),{1,2,3,4,5}))This formula, as I’m sure you’ve all effortlessly deduced, returns the total score of the five highest rated songs from any particular album.
This is then multiplied by the average song score for the whole album and converted into what I call the ‘Percentage Of Perfection’ — or POP.
See what I did there.
The POP Scale
On the POP scale, Bob’s albums range from a zenith of 88% to a nadir of 11%, with an average of 43%.
That might sound quite low, but remember the five point scale. An album of mostly twos and threes — a not unpleasant, if unmemorable, experience — would score 30%.
A POP score of 43% could be an album that’s got one killer track, a couple of bangers, a couple of boppers and the rest filler. That’s a decent album in my book.
I’ve not got as much raw data on any other artist (and I don’t have time to go through all thirteen Beatles studio albums), but let’s use Arctic Monkeys as a reference:
- Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not = 73% POP
- Favourite Worst Nightmare = 31%
- Humbug = 26% (apparently I haven’t listened to it enough 🙄)
- AM = 75%
(Side note: these are four of the six albums that Arctic Monkeys released in their first twelve years of operation. By that time, Dylan had released thirteen. Just saying.)
In short, over 60% POP is a sublime album — and Dylan’s done seven of them, as you can see from this chart:
Note: I haven’t scored Columbia’s 1973 rogue outtake album, nor the trilogy of songbook albums Dylan released between 2015 and 2017 because a) I haven’t got them and b) I’ve heard they’re not worth the entry fee.
Scraping The Barrel
You can all guess the highest scoring albums; the real fun is found scraping the barrel at the bottom of the scale.
No surprises to see the universally panned Knocked Out Loaded and Saved down there, but as bad as these (or worse) was an album described by Rolling Stone as ‘a stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him’.
Nope. Not in my world. Infidels (1983) is shite. Yes: even Jokerman. I don’t get it.
Instead of leaving you on a downer, I’ll leave you with three pearls cast into the swineyard of three otherwise scarcely redeemable Dylan albums:
- Dark Eyes from Empire Burlesque (1985, 24%)
- Forgetful Heart from Together Through Life (2009, 24%)
- Blind Willie McTell cut (cut!) from Infidels (1983, 11%)