Just about everybody thinks of Slow Train Coming as Bob Dylan’s first record after becoming a Christian*. And while that’s certainly true, and while that makes it a milestone, it often undermines the value of the music therein, which is understatedly magnificent.

There’s a subtlety to most of the songs that is new to Dylan–typically, a song’s dynamic level was set by the opening strains and never dropped or crescendoed. That’s not the case here, with the backing band slow swelling and shrinking behind Dylan when needed. The greatest examples of this are in When You Gonna Wake Up and Gotta Serve Somebody, both of which are lead by a prog-tinged electric piano. And while the rises and falls are never drastic, the delicacy the backing band shows in handling them is masterful and effective. Dylan also shows his finest finger-picking since Girl From the North Country on the fragile Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others), which is probably the best song on here. The beautiful closer, When He Returns, is accompanied by a solo piano, conjuring the camp meetings of my youth.

Lyrically, the album was criticized for being dogmatic and wrathful. Listening to it, it seems most of that is a byproduct of the listener’s agreement or disagreement with Dylan. His words themselves, while maintaining a degree of the same finger-pointing as he had always maintained, a great deal of those fingers are, like on Blood on the Tracks, pointed at himself. Dylan’s fingers aren’t pointing as much here as they are outstretched to his friends and family to make peace, like on Do Right To Me Baby and Precious Angel, or raised up to his Maker, like on I Believe In You. Man Gave Names to All the Animals is a little more appropriate for a Sunday school than a Bob Dylan record, with some rhyme-before-content lyrics (He saw milk comin’ out but he didn’t know how/“Ah, think I’ll call it a cow”), but the closing line is absolutely genius, singing of a serpent, “Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake…” and then not finishing the rhyme, calling to mind the temptation of Eve and the shock or intrigue or curiosity Adam received it with. It’s a brilliant moment in an otherwise inane song.

But if there’s anything the album makes perfectly clear, it’s that while Bob Dylan may have changed his way of thinking and was now serving somebody, at the end of the day, he was still Bob Dylan. He had just found something greater than himself.

*fun fact: after his conversion, Dylan joined a church out of the Vineyard Movement. I attend and work at a Vineyard Church.