4th Time Around

[6][5] Johnston organized for experienced session musicians including Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Kenneth Buttrey and Joe South to play with Dylan.

[8] Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that "the guitar figure repeats a rippling, romantic Mexican cadence".

[9] Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin speculated that "4th Time Around" was written either hours or days before the Nashville recording session.

[11] Critic Michael Gray refers to the start of the track as a "cold, mocking put-down of a woman and a relationship untouched by love".

[12] Commentators often interpret "4th Time Around" as a response to the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)",[2] written by John Lennon for the 1965 album Rubber Soul.

[16] They were appreciative of each other's work,[17] and some commentators have identified Dylan, whose lyrics contained "honest self-scrutiny and melancholy" as an influence on Lennon's writing in particular, first evidenced in "I'm a Loser" (1964).

[17] Heylin has suggested that Dylan, having noticed his influence on Rubber Soul, wrote "4th Time Around" as "a way of showing that he could raise the bar lyrically on Lennon".

[18] Classics scholar Richard F. Thomas considers that the Beatles track "sounds coy, almost innocent in comparison to the sophistication of Dylan's voice and lyrics".

[23] Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Examiner praised the song for "some great, grotesque and funny lines that dip into reality".

[3] Shelton described Dylan's voice on the track as that of "a tired, old bluesman" and commented that "The lyric is runaway fantasy, almost incongruous against the soft musical flow".

[9] Rodgers finds that the "reprehensible" image presented by the narrator is "heavily distorted by boyish naiveté and Socratic irony and actually works in such a way as to make the whole affair extremely humorous".

[27] The live debut was on February 26, 1966, at Island Garden, West Hempstead, New York,[27] and it featured regularly on setlists until the conclusion of his 1966 World Tour, on May 26, 1966, at the Royal Albert Hall, London.