Posted in aesthetics, dylan, music, reviews on 12 Oct 2008
When is Dylan at his best these days? When he pulls out his guitar once and again? Or perhaps delivers a blistering harp solo? Or when he soars to the top of his vocal register in a beautifully raw rendition of an old warhorse? Or is it on his albums, the three great artistic and commercial achievements Time Out Of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times?
Neither. No matter how great his studio albums are, his greatest artistic achievement during the 2000s comes from a different kind of studio. A small one, by the sound of it. I recently became the proud owner of a true gem: the complete recordings of the first season of his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour.
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Posted in dylan on 30 Mar 2008
I’ve always maintained that Tangled Up in Blue or Brownsville Girl is Dylan’s greatest song. Well, I’ve been wrong, and I’ve known it all the time — I’ve just not been able to shake off the social pressure that his best song just had to be either something from Blood on the Tracks, wildly exploiting the Dylanesque shifts of perspective, storylines, and pronouns, or the greatest epic since Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
But of course: it has to be a seemingly simple song, loaded with one-liners, a song which floats on a light, humorous mood all the way to the end, where everything is suddenly turned upside down — not in any way discarding what …
Posted in aesthetics, announcements, dylan, music on 27 Feb 2008
Most of my posts begin “it’s been a while”, it seems, and so does this one. This time, it’s been a self-imposed silence, because I’ve been busy finishing a book on lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — perhaps not your cup of tea, but it’s what I do for a living.
Anyway, my real book is coming along as well — my collected writings about Dylan and his music — and I’ve wrapped up another article, this time an extended translation of the article I wrote for the Norwegian philosophical journal Agora last spring. It’s a survey of some traits of Dylan’s musical carreer, seen as a pulse of phases of appropriation, internalization, and moving on, almost …