Good as I Been to You
| Bob Dylan
Good as I Been to You
Good as I Been to You is the 28th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on November 3, 1992, by Columbia Records. It is composed entirely of traditional folk songs and covers, and is Dylan's first entirely solo, acoustic album since Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. It is also his first collection not to feature any original compositions since Dylan in 1973. On the charts, Good as I Been to You reached No. 51 in the US and No. 18 in the UK, and helped to restore Dylan's critical standing following the disappointing Under the Red Sky.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
1993. This fascinating exploration of musical roots is more than a diversion for musicologists. Good As I Been to You shows that sometimes one can look back and find something that’s both timeless and relevant. It also proves once again that Dylan can still be every bit as good as he’s been to us in the past.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
2017. A concerted return toward the stripped-down folk music Dylan played early in his career, 'Good as I Been to You' followed years of increasingly dense and overproduced records.
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All Music
Yes, this could be seen as a rather unassuming record, but that's what's special about it. In 1992, not even folksingers were working with this material, but Dylan did, reviving folk's (and rock's) ties to the past at an unexpected time and with unexpectedly strong results.
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Prefix Magazine
2012. It’s an album of vocals, guitar, and harmonica, which Dylan hadn’t done since early in his career. And the songs themselves weren’t his, but instead old and mostly traditional folk songs. On paper, it feels like a safe play. But in practice it is something far more thrilling. Dylan sounds wholly at home on these songs, and while the takes here are reverent they also feel like they are completely his.
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Kirkville
2015. Listening to Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, you can hear how much Dylan respects the classics of folk and blues music. He gets it right; he doesn’t try and turn these songs into “Dylan songs,” but he just plays and sings them.
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People
1992. Good as I Been to You is the best new Dylan album in years. Jettisoning producers and session musicians—and the need to write lyrics—must have been liberating, because Hob plays and sings his heart out. The format and such songs as “Diamond Joe,” “Canadee-i-o,” and “Little Maggie” hark back to Dylan’s early days as a lone folksinger, but there isn’t a nostalgic moment on the record.
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Robert Christgau
But most of these old tunes he gooses or caresses to some kind of arousal--he clearly knows the sensitive spots of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" and the antiredcoat jig "Arthur McBride." Not that he thinks such intimacy yields a self-portrait. Older than that now, he merely explores a world of song whose commonness and strangeness he knows he'll never comprehend.
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The Current
2017. Released back to back in subsequent years of the early ’90s, Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong represented Dylan getting into the spirit of the unplugged era. As many listeners pointed out at the time, they were the albums that much of Dylan’s original fan base had wished he’d made instead of going electric 30 years earlier: solo acoustic records (his first since Another Side of Bob Dylan) featuring exclusively covers of folk and blues nuggets.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
A collection of little-known folk songs, all solo vocal and acoustic guitar. The track selection is interesting, covering a broad swath from slow blues . . . to love songs happy . . . and unhappy . . ., to just plain fun . . . and a number of the story-songs that presumably helped form his own storytelling style ("Frankie & Albert," "Diamond Joe").
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George Starostin's Reviews
It can be described in one sentence - "Bob Dylan plays old acoustic folk songs" - and having read that, you won't actually raise an eyebrow throughout. . . . Nor is it spectacular in the way of playing, arranging or anything else. It's just... nice.
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