Bootleg Series 18

Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release Bob Dylan’s "Bootleg Series Volume 18 : Through The Open Window 1956-1963" on October 31st, 2025.

"Through The Open Window" tells the story of Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota to the Greenwich Village bohemia in the early 1960's. 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 are exceedingly rare, others have never been presented in any form.

The box set is 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, including “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” It concludes with a previously unreleased recording, in its entirety, of Dylan’s landmark concert at Carnegie Hall on October 26th, 1963. A culmination of Dylan’s exceptional early rise, that concert also marked the end of the beginning of Dylan’s long career.

“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”.

The 8 CD Deluxe set includes 139 tracks, and 48 of them never before released performances, as well as 38 super rare cuts, plus a hardcover book with extensive liner notes by Sean Wilentz and over 100 rare photographs. The 2 CD set and the 4 LP set highlight editions include 42 tracks.