Bob Dylan performs in the classic mode
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Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images Frank Sinatra smiling in a studio portrait, circa 1945. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
EnlargeBob Dylan isn't known for a crooner's voice, but his new album of covers, many done by Frank Sinatra, offers his unique take on American standards.
The latest album from music’s sliest quick-change artist sounds like a dare, or a joke.
Dylan doing Sinatra? The croaker doing the crooner? It sounds as crazy as Zimmy’s Christmas album that bombed five years ago.
Surprise! On the new “Shadows in the Night,” Dylan redefines the songs entirely, making them conform to his character rather than the other way around.
In a sense, the Sinatra conceit was a fudge to begin with. Songs like “Autumn Wind” and “I’m a Fool to Want You” may have been famously cut by Ol’ Blue Eyes. But they’re also standards, penned by writers like Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Which means they’ve already been covered by half the human race.
Columbia Records Bob Dylan's album cover for Shadows in the Night “Strangers” isn’t the first time Dylan has cast aside his songwriting gifts to duck under a covers albums. But on earlier works, like “Good As I Been To You” and “World Gone Wrong,” both from the 1990s, Dylan inhabited blues songs and murder ballads from his true comfort zone, the folk tradition.
On “Shadows,” the star references Sinatra’s far more urbane world, but rather than taking the Chairman’s orchestral approach, Dylan employed just five players - and had them work stealthily. The instruments are apparitions, ghostly suggestions. A doleful pedal steel guitar dabs the tracks, while a cello darkly traces. Here, and there, a muted horn hangs in the air, or a tap of percussion sweeps a cymbal. Otherwise, it’s all on Dylan’s voice, an instrument long ago frayed to the point of ravage.
Or so it has seemed to anyone who has attended a Dylan concert for the past decade. Heard live, Dylan can sound like a frog ... undergoing a tracheotomy ... without anesthetic. In this collection, Dylan’s voice is a wisp, as dark and ephemeral as cigarette smoke. But it’s also as evocative, with character to burn.
The croaker doing the crooner? It sounds as crazy — but it works.
The way he holds the word “vain” in “Where Are You?” speaks of deep memory and understanding. Many of the songs center on heartsick yearning. But, at this point in his life, Dylan is singing of a long-ago love recalled, not one lived in now. He delivers the songs at an age — 73 — when longing has a very different pull on the soul. He filters pain more wisely, with acceptance and sadness in place of rage and want. That’s an ideal perspective for a song like “Stay With Me,” where loyalty trumps passion. It’s also a neat way to move “Autumn Leaves” a season ahead, to the ruminations of a true lion in winter.
Dylan also uses this perspective for humor. “Why Try to Change Me Now” could be his theme song, with lines like “Why can’t I be more conventional?/Let people wonder/Let ’em laugh/I was always your clown/Why try to change me now?”
Dylan’s triumph isn’t entirely a question of character. In “That Lucky Old Sun” he hits a note at the end that’s downright bravura. Likewise, there’s great care in the brush-stroke instrumentation throughout.
Back at the start of his career, Dylan famously joked that he was just a song-and-dance man. Listening to “Shadows” suggests he wasn’t entirely kidding.
- Title:
- Bob Dylan 'Shadows In The Night'
- Venue:
- Columbia Records
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