10 Classic Rock Bands That Ripped Off Themselves

If there's anyone in rock who should never be slacking off in the lyrical department, it's Bob Dylan. As much as he may have his ups and downs as a songwriter, the man behind classics like Ballad of a Thin Man and Tangled Up in Blue is always going to be held to a slightly different standard than your average sex, drugs, and rock and roll songs. And at the end of his glory decade of the '60s, he opened up his country album with...the same song again.

This isn't even a joke. Girl From the North Country was already a Bob Dylan song, being one of the standouts from the Freewheelin Bob Dylan just a few years earlier. On this record though, it's Dylan doing a completely different take on the song, using the same chord structure by sprucing it up as a bit of a country leaning tune than the folk original. Though we do get some lines from country legend Johnny Cash, this feels like it belongs more on his record than Dylan's.

There's nothing wrong with it other than the fact that you so rarely see a band covering themselves on a record, complete with the exact same vocal inflections that Dylan was known for back in the day. Then again, if he was transitioning into a different sound, maybe this was Dylan's way of trying to recontextualize one of his older songs for the next era of his career. Still, since the original wasn't even a decade old at this point, you have to at least give a cover of the song some breathing room, right?