The songs that made Shot of Love

Throughout his recording career it was not unusual for Dylan to run through covers to get the creative juices flowing, ‘Shot of Love’ is no exception.

and

Jul 12, 2025

Bob Dylan’s 1981 Shot of Love sessions deserve their own multiple disc Bootleg Series release. There was an amazing array of songs being written, recorded, jammed out, scrapped, rescued, drowned. Some of which Bootleg Series Vol. 3, Trouble No More and Springtime in New York touch on. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The sessions, which took place over many months from Rundown Studios in March through Cream Studios and Clover Studios in April and May, stand out not only for Dylan’s proliferation of original material, but also for the many cover songs, from traditional folk to country standards and Motown ballads.

Amongst it all producers would come and go, Jimmy Iovine, the great Bumps Blackwell and Chuck Plotkin. The album was going in one direction with Iovine, but once Bumps Blackwell ‘conducted’ a session, EVERYTHING changed and Dylan wasn’t quite the same afterwards.

The remaining sessions featured a Dylan searching for how to get back to that feel and sound that Blackwell uncovered and along the way discarding perfectly great songs and encountering new masterpieces.

Shot of Love’s sessions in that light seem almost schizophrenically creative. There‘S more than one album trying to emerge much in the same way as would happen with Time out of Mind 16 years later.

Dylan frequently recorded alternate versions and jams including early takes of “Angelina,” “Caribbean Wind,” and “Heart of Mine.”

The bootleg series would reveal by alternate takes the incredible journeys some songs took, specifically outtake masterpiece ‘Angelina’ and the poly-rhythmic ‘You Changed My Life,’ (in their Bootleg Series Vol. 3 release) which really should have made it to the album.

There’s brilliant loose and open sounding recordings in the Blackwell mode and there’s these epic ballads played with such precision and finesse and they just don’t sit together in sequence. The problem at the end of months of sessions is Dylan had incredible performances and recordings that couldn’t always sit side by side on an album, they couldn’t flow together, so ultimately perhaps Dylan’s final decision on the album was the right one. But there’s definitely the ghost of another lost album in there.

The tracks that would rear their heads the most during the sessions were, “Dead Man, Dead Man,” “You Changed My Life,” “Heart of Mine,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Watered-Down Love,” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar.”

Throughout his recording career it’s not unusual for Dylan to run through covers to get the creative juices flowing. Maybe just for fun, or to demonstrate something to the band for that session or teach them a style or genre consciously or subconsciously. We know he did it on Love And Theft. We first really see it happening from The Basement Tapes (if that counts), but he’s doing it during Self Portrait, New Morning, Planet Waves and even Blood on the Tracks and Infidels.

Here are some of the covers that I was able to identify that may have somehow helped Dylan along the way to making Shot of Love: