Bob Dylan在那张感人至深的Blood on the Tracks之后着手制作的一张专辑。专辑录制即将完成的时候，他的前妻Sara也去听了，而Bob Dylan就在此时第一次公开演唱了那首《Sara》（此前连乐队成员都没有听他唱过），他当着Sara的面唱出了对她的眷恋，在歌曲的最后，Bob Dylan唱出了“Sara, Sara, Don't ever leave me, don't ever go” ，录音就在这句对Sara的深情呼唤中结束。这张专辑成为Bob Dylan商业上最成功的专辑之一，占据了年度全美专辑排行榜的首位，英国排行榜第三，虽然相比Sara的离去，这种商业成功对于Bob Dylan来说也许并无多少意义。除了那首《Sara》，其它歌曲也非常动听，因此这张专辑堪称Bob Dylan最好听的作品之一，口琴和小提琴的大量使用也为歌曲增色不少。

这张专辑在滚石杂志选出的500张历代最强专辑中排名第174位。

If Blood on the Tracks was an unapologetically intimate affair, Desire is unwieldy and messy, the deliberate work of a collective. And while Bob Dylan directly addresses his crumbling relationship with his wife, Sara, on the final track, Desire is hardly as personal as its predecessor, finding Dylan returning to topical songwriting and folk tales for the core of the record. It's all over the map, as far as songwriting goes, and so is it musically, capturing Dylan at the beginning of the Rolling Thunder Revue era, which was more notable for its chaos than its music. And, so it's only fitting that Desire fits that description as well, as it careens between surging folk-rock, Mideastern dirges, skipping pop, and epic narratives. It's little surprise that Desire doesn't quite gel, yet it retains its own character -- really, there's no other place where Dylan tried as many different styles, as many weird detours, as he does here. And, there's something to be said for its rambling, sprawling character, which has a charm of its own. Even so, the record would have been assisted by a more consistent set of songs; there are some masterpieces here, though: "Hurricane" is the best-known, but the effervescent "Mozambique" is Dylan at his breeziest, "Sara" at his most nakedly emotional, and "Isis" is one of his very best songs of the '70s, a hypnotic, contemporized spin on a classic fable. This may not add up to a masterpiece, but it does result in one of his most fascinating records of the '70s and '80s -- more intriguing, lyrically and musically, than most of his latter-day affairs.