Someone Please Fire Jack Frost

… or at least his little helper. You know, the little guy who sneaks in when Mr Frost has gone for lunch, and turns knobs that are best left alone. His intentions may be the noblest, but as we all know, Satan sometimes comes as a Man of Peace.

Frost, who also goes by the name of Bob Dylan, has produced a number of said artist’s records, and one would suspect that he, of all people, would agree with Dylan’s harsh verdict in a recent Rolling Stone interview on the sound quality of records today:

You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.

fairly recent blogpost by Sean Curnyn takes up this statement and turns it back on Dylan. Curnyn refers to a series of posts by Pete Bilderback on his blog Flowering Toilet, which give graphical examples of the difference in dynamic range between LP and CD versions of the same songs.

Here’s the LP version of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’:

Thunder on the Mountain, LP version

And here is what most of us — who are not sound geeks and have therefore bought the CD — hear:

Thunder on the Mountain, CD version

The difference (according to the two posts — I’m no expert in sound engineering), stems from the abuse of compression, a technique that is used in order to fill the sound-space as much as possible, and make the music stand out more clearly, even in the soft moments. Put to moderate use, it can enhance a recording, but as a weapon in the “Loudness War”, it is lethal — it kills the dynamic range in the recording (as the above examples show), and since dynamics is one of the most important tools to make music alive, we may have a serious baby and bath water situation here.

I refer to the other posts for further evidence and explanation. I, for one, am convinced, and it’s ironic that the “static” that Dylan refers to is so predominant on his own latest albums.

Why there should be this difference between the CD and the LP versions, I don’t know. One of the commenters at the Flowering Toilet mentions that the same difference could be noticed between the version of ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothing’ which was given out as a free download, and the version on the released album. So apparently the little helper works late, and only in the CD plant.

For the record, if I consider Modern Times and especially Together Through  Life lacklustre and on the whole unsucessful, it’s mainly because of the material. But a sound (huh…) advice for Dylan/Frost might be: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot — shoot the sound engineer instead.

Thanks to Heinrich Küttler of SEAL fame for bringing those posts to my attention.

How to Die with a Clean Grave (aka Ten Blessed Minutes in Hell With Your Host Lou Reed)

I have to do this in a bulleted list, because that’s as long as I can hold a thought: why this is the most glorious ten minutes I’ve spent in any hell in a long time (at least since Christmas in the Heart)

  • The beauty of seeing an acid city slicker singing delta blues, which proves that there are many paths to the blues — too much of either whiskey, cotton picking, broken hearts,  or cocaine and educational electro shocks @ young & tender age
  • If Take no Prisoners is Lou Reed’s best album, this is the best remake of it: the refusal to let it die, the refusal to let the beauty of whatever you’re singing take over, and the song’s refusal to take your refusal into account.
  • if you’re ugly from the start and manage to communicate sublime beauty in/despite that condition (alternatively: if you choose to communicate your desperate take on sublime beauty in an ugly form) you will not age, and since you don’t age, you will never die.
  • Anyone who watches this and still wants a strat instead of a tele should have his brain checked (unless he has black curly hair, enormous hands (and you know what they say about big hands), and died in 1970).

(Thanks to Meinhard for putting this up on his Facebook profile)

World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound

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. Continue reading World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound

Good Links: Theme Time Radio and Tell Tale Signs

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.

Can’t Wait

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.

Continue reading Can’t Wait

Dylan At His Very Best

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.

Continue reading Dylan At His Very Best

The Uneven Heart — Bob Dylan The Musician

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 like a heartbeat, hence the title “The Uneven Heart”.

The article is available as a separate pdf file or as part of the full book, Things Twice. There is also a plain HTML version, without the typographical niceties of the book version.

As always, I welcome comments. As always, too, there may be typos, errors, inconsistencies, the odd word in Norwegian which I’ve overlooked in the translation, etc. If you spot any such things, please let me know.

Luciano

“Well I really wasn’t such a Johnny Ace fan,
But I felt bad all the same”

I don’t think any death in the classical world could have touched me as much as this one, without there being any specific reason for being touched, since I wasn’t really into this particular kind of popular hawling of opera into the marketplace. Strange.

Perhaps it’s just that he was a great singer with an obvious presence and something as old-fashioned as love for what he was doing.

Damn, he’s gone now. I miss him already.

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935–2007

A Norwegian Bestseller

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 Tapes; about the borrowings from Ovid on *Modern Times*; Dylan’s relationship with various American poetic genres (blues, Allen Ginsberg); his voice; his meandering path around folk music; and about the reception of “his” tradition in Norway. There is also an article by Christopher Ricks in Norwegian translation, and translations of the Playboy interview from 1966 and of some song lyrics.

All in all a very nice collection of essays. The bias towards lyrical and “sociological”(-ish) analysis is somewhat balanced out by the article about “Dylan the Musician” by yours truly.

Thus, if you can read Norwegian and want something to lighten up the September evenings, this might be it.

If you can get hold of a copy, that is.

Modern times in Copenhagen

It was time to order tickets again, for yet another last Dylan show I’d ever go to. I usually do that, and probably will for as long as he stays on the road. Thinking that it’s the last time, adds a certain nostalgic undertone to the experience.
After the past few years of mediocrity, the expectations were low. I can’t say I was overly prepared either, but at least I knew that the band was the same as the one I’d seen a year and a half ago, and that didn’t bode well.
Then there was the new album… A good one, for sure — must be, since it could bring the old bard to the top of all the charts in the world. Some people had voiced misgivings about the legitimacy of the phrase “All songs written by Bob Dylan”, but hey, he’s a genius, right, so he must be right, right?

Continue reading Modern times in Copenhagen

Dylan the Postmodernist?

I had originally thought that I wasn’t going to write much about Modern Times. I was wrong. What started out as a short, indignant review of the musical borrowings on the album, was then followed up by a somewhat longer discussion of the lyrical borrowings from H. Timrod, which I have now wrapped up in a longish piece which traverses the death of the author, copyright laws, various connections between ethics and aesthetics, oh yes, and Dylan’s later work. The last piece has so much significant use of italics that I don’t dare to let it out in a plain-html version, so you will have to download a pdf file. I’ve made it available in two versions: one with only the article itself, the other bundled with the two previous texts (both links go to pdf files).

It’s Modern to Steal

The question is not so much: “Is this a good Dylan album?” – which it is – as “Is this a Dylan album?” – which it isn’t.

First the lyrics: as Scott Warmuth has discovered, through an ingenious google investigation, several lines of lyrics are lifted from the works of the “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy” Henry Timrod in much the same way as Yunichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza unwittingly contributed to “Love and Theft”. This has caused considerable reactions, in far wider circles than usual.

So, is Dylan a thieving scoundrel and a plagiarist, or a genius who transforms what he reads into new gems?

Continue reading It’s Modern to Steal

Things Twice – The Book

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 demonstration in a concrete analysis of three versions of Mr Tambourine Man, which I consider prime examples of the method. This is included as a new chapter in the book.

Other than that, the book contains most of the articles that are already available in the Professors section of the site, but I have also added some stuff which is not there (teaser…). The new stuff is: the rewritten Lonnie chapter, the follow-up about the Three Tambourine Men, an article I wrote for Judas! a while back, about Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one…!), and a short piece about In The Garden. I have also rewritten and updated several of the other articles. Eventually, I may re-incorporate the changes into the webpages, but from now on, I consider the book the main source.

The music examples to the analysis of the T-Men can be downloaded separately, both as midi-files and as pdf-files. Get them here.

All the music examples in the book have been produced with Lilypond, a free, open-source music typesetter which is quite similar to LaTeX: plain-text input, steep learning curve, but superb output, once one gets to know the machinery. Highly recommended.

As this is a learning experiment, there are still some things that are not perfect — some figures that are missing, some hyphens which ought to be en dashes, etc. Bear with me — I will clean it up, eventually.

Happy reading!