PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSanders’s emphasis on the Nashville cats’ ability to give the right sound to songs that Dylan was literally writing in the studio sheds new light on one of the 20th century’s central cultural artifacts ... One comes away from That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound with an understanding of how privileged an artist Dylan was in 1966 ... it’s a revelation to discover that he sang certain lyrics literally moments after thinking them up. Sanders gets deep into the evolution of many songs’ lyrics ... Sanders’s blow-by-blow reconstruction of the sessions embodies his book’s greatest strength and weakness ... An amateur Dylanologist, I found the book gripping, but for the uninitiated, there’s not necessarily much narrative tension ... An unsympathetic reader might find Sanders’s attention to detail laborious ... Sanders gets priceless details ... Sanders’s recovery of such moments becomes all the more valuable because, incredibly, there are no photographs of them.
