Bob had a lot of ideas to sort through, there were a lot of different versions of each song he had to settle on before he could decide where he wanted them to go, and I think he had this vision in his head that maybe he couldn’t quite articulate to the band as quickly, so it took a few times trying out ideas to get it to land where he wanted it to be. Shaw remembered the recording sessions going slower for Modern Times than for Love and Theft: "The sessions for Modern Times went a little slower, it took maybe a month rather than three weeks. As with its predecessor, Love and Theft, Modern Times was engineered and mixed by Chris Shaw. Dylan and band rehearsed the songs at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, in late January and early February, 2006, before heading to New York City to record them. This iteration of the Never Ending Tour band had played with Dylan for the entirety of 2005.
Receli, guitarists Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman, plus multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron. The album was recorded with Dylan's touring band, including bassist Tony Garnier, drummer George G. 5.3 Dylan's response to credit controversy.In the 2012 version of Rolling Stone magazine's list of " The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", Modern Times was ranked at No. 204. It reached No. 3 in the UK and the Netherlands, respectively, and had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. It also reached No. 1 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland, debuted No. 2 in Germany, Austria and Sweden. At age 65, Dylan became the oldest living person at the time to have an album enter the Billboard charts at No. 1. It was also his first album to debut at the summit of the Billboard 200, selling 191,933 copies in its first week.
Modern Times became Dylan's first No. 1 album in the U.S. Despite the acclaim, the album sparked some debate over its uncredited use of choruses and arrangements from older songs, as well as many lyrical lines taken from the work of 19th-century poet Henry Timrod. It continued its predecessors' tendencies toward blues, rockabilly and pre-rock balladry, and was self-produced by Dylan under the pseudonym "Jack Frost". The album was the third work (following Time Out of Mind and "Love And Theft") in a string of albums by Dylan that garnered wide acclaim from critics. Modern Times is the 32nd studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 29, 2006, by Columbia Records.