After a break of two years Bob Dylan has announced Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963. The music icon and Nobel prize winner will release the extensive 8-CD/2-CD/4-LP box set on Friday October 31, 2025 via Columbia/Legacy Recordings.
“Arriving amidst a global resurgence in appreciation for Dylan, the collection includes rare Columbia Records outtakes, recordings made at club dates, in tiny informal gatherings, in friends’ apartments, and at jam sessions in long-gone musicians’ hangouts.” Many of the recordings featured in the box set are “exceedingly rare”, while other tracks “have never been presented in any form” before.
The collection will give fans a “unique account of Dylan’s early years, when he honed his talent, and transformed traditional folk songs and lyric sketches into some of his greatest and most enduring songs. These include classics like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’.
Through The Open Window concludes with a previously unreleased full recording of Dylan’s landmark concert at NYC’s Carnegie Hall in October 1963. The show marked the end of the beginning of Dylan’s long career, following his early rise.
“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes author and historian Sean Wilentz in his 125-page liner notes essay.
“Even so, as an aural record of an artist becoming himself – or in Dylan’s case, his first of many artistic selves – the collection aims to collapse time and space, not as a nostalgic reverie but as a living connection between the past and the present, the old and the new, which are never as distinct as we might think.”
You can pre-order Bootleg Series Volume 18 here.
