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Continue reading November 3: Bob Dylan released Good As I Been To You in 1992
Category Archives: Bob Dylan albums
October 26: Bob Dylan released World Gone Wrong in 1993
“Dylan’s second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing”
– Robert Christgau (A-)“it’s the liner notes that offer the most interesting aspect of the album…[With] the songs steeped in deceit, treachery, venality and despair—not to mention his sometimes slightly berserk annotations—the picture builds up of the Blues as Bible Study, a series of lessons to be interpreted.”
– Andy Gill (The Independent)
World Gone Wrong is the twenty-ninth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on October 26, 1993 by Columbia Records.
It was Dylan’s second consecutive collection of only traditional folk songs, performed acoustically with guitar and harmonica. The songs tend to deal with darker and more tragic themes than the previous outing, Good as I Been to You.
The album received a warm reception from critics. Despite earning a Grammy award for Best Traditional Folk Album, it peaked at a modest #70 in the US, and at #35 in the UK.
I really like this album, the power of Dylan’s performance here cannot be overstated. The guitar playing has a feel to it that is very appealing, I can picture Dylan sitting alone, having the time of his life (you can hear him tapping his feet on Ragged & Dirty). When the world has gone wrong, of course, one thing you can do is sing the blues. Bob Dylan brought things back to the roots on these two albums (Good as I been to you and World Gone Wrong).
This one is from the heart!
Continue reading October 26: Bob Dylan released World Gone Wrong in 1993
Bob Dylan: The Gospel Years, Part 3 – Slow Train Coming (album)
It’s in my system. I don’t really have enough time to talk about it. If someone really wants to know, I can explain it to them, but there are other people who can do it just as well. I don’t feel compelled to do it. I was doing a bit of that last year on the stage. I was saying stuff I figured people needed to know. I thought I was giving people an idea of what was behind the songs. I don’t think it’s necessary any more. When I walk around some of the towns we go to, however, I’m totally convinced people need Jesus. Look at the junkies and the winos and the troubled people. It’s all a sickness which can be healed in an instant. The powers that be won’t let that happen. The powers that be say it has to be healed politically.
~Bob Dylan (to Robert Hilburn – Nov 1980)Musically, this is probably Dylan’s finest record, a rare coming together of inspiration, desire and talent that completely fuse strength, vision and art.
~Jann S. Wenner (rollingstone.com – Sept. 1979)Slow Train Coming was a collection of songs Dylan had originally intended to donate to backing singer Carolyn Dennis.
~Clinton Heylin (The Recording Sessions)Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted
Can’t help but wonder what’s happenin’ to my companions
Are they lost or are they found
Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down
All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?
There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend
~Bob Dylan (from the title cut)
Slow Train Coming:
Continue reading Bob Dylan: The Gospel Years, Part 3 – Slow Train Coming (album)
August 10: Bob Dylan released Shot of Love in 1981
August 10: Bob Dylan released Shot of Love in 1981
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
Shot of Love is Bob Dylan’s 21st studio album, it was released by Columbia Records in August 1981.
It is generally considered to be Dylan’s last of a trilogy of overtly religious, Christian albums. Also, it was his first since becoming born-again to focus on secular themes, from straight-ahead love songs to an ode to the deceased comedian Lenny Bruce. Arrangements are rooted more in rock’n’roll, less in gospel than on Dylan’s previous two albums. So maybe it is more of a new start than a gospel-tinged end?
Continue reading August 10: Bob Dylan released Shot of Love in 1981
June 26: Bob Dylan & The Band – The Basement Tapes (1975)
That was recorded in ‘66, ‘67 up in Woodstock, you know, before Woodstock, before the big Woodstock Festival, before Woodstock was discovered, exploited, I don’t know. We were just all up there sort of drying out.
[Mary Travers: You and the Band?]
Yeah. The members of the Band and various other people, up there making music and planting gardens and just watching time go by. So in the meantime we made this record, made this – actually it wasn’t a record, it was just songs which we’d come, you know, to, er, this basement and record; out in the woods. That’s basically it really. Uh, the records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in it’s entirety and know just exactly what we were doing up there in those years and it’ll be out shortly.
~Bob Dylan (Mary Travers interview, April 1975)People have told me they think it’s very Americana and all that. I don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.
~Bob Dylan (Kurt Loder interview, March 1984)..Because the Dylan is all work tape, the music is certifiably unpremeditated, lazy as a river and rarely relentless or precise–laid back without complacency or slickness. The writerly “serious” songs like “Tears of Rage” are all the richer for the company of his greatest novelties–if “Going to Acapulco” is a dirge about having fun, “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” is a ditty about separation from self, and both modes are enriched by the Band’s more conventional (“realistic”) approach to lyrics. We needn’t bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967 too. And it’s sure to sound great in 1983. A+
~Robert Christgau (album review in 1975)..John Rockwell in the New York Times declared it “The greatest album in the history of popular American music.” But it wasn”t, and for all the riches within it, all of which are presented out of context, it was a shamefully poor representation of an astonishingly creative, important period in this great artist”s working life.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)
“Odds & Ends” @ spotify:
Continue reading June 26: Bob Dylan & The Band – The Basement Tapes (1975)