Posted in dylan, interviews on 23 Mar 2009
I must say I like it when Dylan agrees with me. I once suggested to let the brown passports in ‘Desolation Row’ mean brown passports, and then see what happens. Now Dylan says:
Images don’t hang anybody [i.e. in the new audience] up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up.
In what way?
Well for instance, if there are shadows and flowers and swampy ledges in a composition, that’s what they are in their essence. There’s no mystification. That’s one way I can explain it.
Like a locomotive, a pair of boots, a kiss or the rain?
Right. All those things are what they are. Or pieces of what they are. It’s the way you move them around that makes it work.
The image with the crooked astrologer is hilarious. The sad thing about it is that I can imagine that it is not just a hypothetical example exaggerated out of proportions. That at times, that’s what it’s been like to be Dylan. If it’s true that his project in the early nineties was to get that monkey off his shoulder, that’s quite understandable. I almost feel sorry for him, that poor Voice of a Generation.
The whole interview is a nice read. Highly recommended.
Posted in albums, dylan, guitar, music, tabs on 19 Mar 2009
World Gone Wrong (1993) is a body. Not just a great body of work, but a body.
The greatness of this album of folk and blues classics is that there is one voice speaking on it and one person speaking with this voice, whether he speaks guitar, harmonica, or English.
I’ll try to make it a little clearer.
Posted in dylan, religion on 23 Feb 2009
Here’s to memories, to constancy, and to humour:
This is the story: Ten years ago, I was sitting on the lawn outside the library with a beer and my good friend and fine Dylan interpreter Lars. Somehow, the similarities between Bob and Jesus came up: Carpenter/Zimmerman Jews from the north going south to change the world; performing their most important work in the country’s main city at 33, etc.
Since I was extremely busy at the time, working 24/7 to finish my Ph.D. in time (i.e., while I was still 33), I immediately …
Posted in dylan, guitar, links, music on 22 Feb 2009
Scott Warmuth, who first discovered Dylan’s extensive borrowing from Henry Timrod for the lyrics to Modern Times and went on to dig deeper into the Ovidian connection, presents more findings in his blog. Well worth a visit!
The third season of Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is well underway, and it’s as good as it used to be.
Get the shows, and read up on them. Highly recommended!
Acoustic Guitar Magazine has an online lesson with the basics of the guitar styles of Maybelle Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Harvey, and Riley Puckett, compete with music examples, a video, and thorough background material.
Posted in aesthetics, dylan, music, reviews on 18 Feb 2009
Two things in particular make Tell Tale Signs a god-send for the Dylan analyst. One is that it shows how tightly interconnected Dylan’s last three albums are, not only musically but also lyrically: text fragments and themes float between them as if they were part of the same triple album. The other is that it gives an opportunity to study the process that so many musicians who have worked with him have mentioned: that songs can change radically from one session to the next or even between takes. The three versions of “Can’t Wait” are particularly revealing in this respect.
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 dylan on 16 Feb 2009
Just to say: this is a tremendous piece of work!
And: I don’t mind Dylan leaving gems off the official albums, as long as he puts them out like this instead.
And: in a way, it’s even better like this. Hearing facets of the work of a creative mind over a limited period of time can be even more rewarding than a single shot (like an album) or a carreer-spanning tour de force (like the original Bootleg Series 1-3).
More on this later. Stay tuned.
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.
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 …