Desire is the seventeenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 5, 1976, through Columbia Records.

It is one of Dylan's most collaborative efforts, featuring the same caravan of musicians as the acclaimed Rolling Thunder Revue tours the previous year (later documented on The Bootleg Series Vol.

Most of the album was co-written by Jacques Levy, and is composed of lengthy story-songs, two of which quickly generated controversy: the 11-minute-long "Joey", which is seen as glorifying the violent gangster "Crazy Joey" Gallo, and "Hurricane", the opening track that tells a passionate account of the murder case against boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who the song asserts was framed.

According to Clinton Heylin, these were her first shows with drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, the culmination of four years spent "compiling a unique rock & roll sound".

Dylan would spend many nights over the next two weeks in New York's Greenwich Village and The Other End in particular, eventually meeting Rob Stoner and reacquainting himself with Bob Neuwirth.

According to Don DeVito, a representative for Columbia Records, the possibility of forming a band and touring the United States playing unannounced concerts was already being discussed at this point.

According to Levy, "Isis" began life as a "slow dirge", unlike anything he had ever heard before, which he felt gave the appearance of setting the listener up "for a long story".

Others at this session included Rob Stoner, Scarlet Rivera, Emmylou Harris, and the English pub rock band Kokomo.

The following day, Dylan returned to Studio E with roughly half the number of musicians, retaining Stoner, Rivera, Harris, Hugh McCracken, and Vinnie Bell as well as saxophonist Mel Collins and percussionist Jody Linscott of Kokomo.

Written from the point of view of someone "despairing, isolated, [and] lost", "Abandoned Love" debuted as an impromptu performance at the Other End on July 3, 1975.

For this more uptempo album version, the harmony part was sung by Ronee Blakley, leaving the earlier track with Emmylou Harris unreleased.

During the fall tour preceding Desire's release, Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue played a benefit concert for Carter in New York City's Madison Square Garden.

According to music critic Tim Riley, "Isis" tells the story of a young groom who marries his bride before he learns the value of loyalty.

Unbeknownst to him, he was playing a part in a higher story line: the tomb eagerly awaited for the arrival of his companion who dies immediately.

Dylan claimed to have composed the song while visiting the Roma festival in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a French town in the Rhone river delta, in 1975 on his 34th birthday.

A twelve-verse ballad, it describes the life of deceased gangster Joey Gallo and created a substantial amount of controversy when Desire was released.

Dylan presents Gallo as an outlaw with morals, in the tradition of songs like Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd".

Dylan's Gallo refused to kill innocent people, made peace with black men, and shielded his family when he was about to be shot as they were eating in a restaurant.

Many commentators, notably rock critic Lester Bangs, have argued, however, that Gallo was well known as a vicious Mafioso whose documented career was not accurately reflected in the song's lyrics.

Graphic details of the murder had been published in Donald Goddard's book Joey: A Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), while Gallo's friends, actor Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta, were introduced to Dylan through Levy.

After hearing Jerry and Marta Orbach talk about Gallo, Dylan and Levy wrote the entire song in one night.

Unlike legendary outlaws like Robin Hood, or historical ones like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, Gallo was not a figure of the distant past nor was he mythologized by tall tales spread by word-of-mouth and the local press.

Goddard's biography depicted Gallo as a racist who often beat his wife and abused his children, and who had taken part in a brutal gang rape of a young boy while he was in prison.

In a Village Voice article published on March 7, 1976, Bangs argued that some could have considered there to have been an open contract on Gallo for his shooting of gangster Joe Colombo almost a year previously.

Bangs also suggested that two other theories advanced by investigators extremely close to the case showed Gallo attempting to lay claim to territory occupied by other, more powerful mob factions.

Despite all the controversy, Clinton Heylin noted that "Joey" remained the one song from Desire to have regularly featured in concert in the nineties.

An ambitious tribute to his wife, Sara, it is one of Dylan's only songs in which he steps out of his public persona and directly addresses a real person, with striking biographical accuracy.

During the course of the tour, which received heavy media coverage, Dylan and his band unveiled songs from Desire in addition to reinterpreting past works.

The Rolling Thunder Revue was also augmented by guest musicians such as Mick Ronson (best known for his work with David Bowie) and other artists such as Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez who not only contributed during Dylan's set, but also played mini-sets of their own.

"[13] Some critics were not impressed; Robert Christgau wrote: "Although the candid propaganda and wily musicality of "Hurricane" delighted me for a long time, the deceitful bathos of its companion piece "Joey" tempts me to question the unsullied innocence of Rubin Carter himself".