The Beginning of a Cultural Sea Change: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Is the Sound of a New Era, Includes "Masters of War" and "Blowin' in the Wind"

Peek into Studio A Where It All Went Down: Mobile Fidelity's Numbered-Edition Hybrid SACD of 1963 Landmark Plays with Incredible Realism and Clarity

It's the album the ignited sea changes in pop culture, music, songwriting, poetry, and the social consciousness. It's the creation of a 22-year-old visionary still years away from casting a jaundiced eye to the media. It's the sound of change, the feeling of ground shifting beneath one's feet, and the entrance of an entirely new way of thinking. It's the effective beginning of what's arguably the boldest career in music history, the yawning vortex into the complex mind, supernatural wordplay, and folk techniques of a vocalist/guitarist whose name is forever associated with transformation. It's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Mastered from the original master tapes, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents the music with incredible realism. The resonance of Dylan's nylon guitar strings, fingerpicked notes, shivering harmonica fills, and plainspoken timbre possess such you-are-there clarity, openness, and body. Whether it's the exaggerated nasal accents employed on "Down the Highway" or the decay of each strummed line on the entirely acoustic album, previously concealed details, microdynamics, and ambient cues surface – enhancing your experience and peeking inside Columbia's Studio A where history was made.

Exponentially surpassing the potential he demonstrated on his debut, Dylan became a mirror of the concerns, issues, and feelings confronting the nation. Writing and singing with penetrating honesty, observational wit, moral conviction, and scathing emotion, he digs into the madness of war ("Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"), hypocrisy of segregation ("Oxford Town"), urgency of civil rights and freedom ("Blowin' in the Wind"), and multiple angles of unrequited love ("Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice It's All Right") with a literate astuteness and depth that, more than 60 years later, still leave audiences slack-jawed. Satire, absurdist humor, and traditional blues also pepper the album, which rests upon graceful melodies and sparse, poignant patterns.

Viewed as protest songs, love songs, folk songs, or talking blues songs, the material on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylanr emains amongst the most astonishing and imaginative ever committed to tape. It deserves a vehicle that makes as closely intimate as possible the music's connection with you. Your ride awaits.