Posted in Lessons, announcements on 14 Jan 2010
Just a quick note to say that I haven’t abandoned the lessons series, I’ve just been having a Christmas and a headache.
What remains are: Two days of fingerpicking glory, one more chord lesson covering the thousands of chords remaining; a brief look into open tunings (with an obvious focus on Blood on the Tracks); a batch of licks and tricks; and a final lesson summing up some things that might be worth a word or two in addition to what has already been said — tuning, chord family characters, etc.
Posted in announcements, dylan, links, music on 4 Dec 2009
The Danish artist Steffen Brandt has reinterpreted a number of Dylan songs and presented them in a theatre concert. The show runs at Betty Nansen Teatret in Copenhagen until the end of January.
Here’s my review of the show (in Danish).
Posted in announcements, dylan, general on 18 Feb 2009
I admit it: the chords part of dylanchords may be in a decent state (apart from the use of frames, which is sooo last century), but the articles are a mess. There’s the collected pdf volume, the selected links on the Self-ordained Professors page, the blog posts here, and the introductions to some of the albums.
I’ve now decided to do something about it. Here’s the state of affairs:
Things Twice — the book. This will always be the definitive version. If/when I do revisions to articles, this is where they are made. The layout is more pleasant than in any of the other formats. It’s a pdf file, currently c. 2 Mb.
Self-ordained …
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 …
Posted in announcements, dylan, music, reviews on 5 Sep 2007
“Agora: Journal for Metaphysical Speculation” — sounds exciting, right? If one is not thrilled by the prospects of 450 pages of metaphysical speculation, it may make it more interesting to know that well over 300 of them are about Bob Dylan. . .
Agora is a scholarly journal of philosophy, which in my early university days was a major source of inspiration. It was therefore a great honour to be asked to write an article for it for an upcoming special issue about Dylan. Now it’s out, and apparently it is sold out already, at least in the Oslo area.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it looks good, with articles about the lyrical project in the Basement …
Posted in announcements, general on 4 Sep 2007
The blog has been down for a while. How long, I don’t know, and that’s embarrassingly revealing of my recent neglect of the site. In any case, I decided to move the whole thing to my own webspace, and it seems that the transition has worked out nicely.
Not that I was dissatisfied with the former home. From the day that I registered dylanchords.com and left the old, catchy hem.passagen.se/obrecht/backpages/chords, and until I decided to take down the site, around Christmas 2005 because of the threats from the recording/publishing industry, the site has been hosted nicely from a secret location in Gothenburg — may thanks, Oskar! — and the blog remained there until today.
But since I already had this other …
Posted in announcements, dylan, general, music on 12 Jun 2006
For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical …
Posted in announcements, general on 19 Dec 2005
I have a spam filter on this blog. That’s one of the mixed blessings of blogging: once in a while I get bombed with comments like “Like your page, interesting comments” and then fifteen links to online casinos, phentermine, cialis and texas holdem. Most of them never see the light of day, thanks to efficient blocking.
The downside is that once in a while a legitimate post gets trapped too. Usually it’s transparent enough so that those comments end up in “purgatory” and I have to approve them manually (which is why some of you may have experienced a considerable delay before your comments appear on the site), but occasionally, they are sent to “spam hell”.
The irony is that one …
