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Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2015.02.03
Time:
 35:17
Category: Traditional Pop
Producer(s): Jack Frost
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.bobdylan.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] I'm a Fool to Want You (Frank Sinatra, Jack Wolf, Joel Herron) - 4:51
[2] The Night We Called It a Day (Matt Dennis, Tom Adair) - 3:24
[3] Stay with Me (Jerome Moross, Carolyn Leigh) - 2:56
[4] Autumn Leaves (Joseph Kosma, Jacques Prévert, Johnny Mercer) - 3:02
[5] Why Try to Change Me Now (Cy Coleman, Joseph McCarthy) - 3:38
[6] Some Enchanted Evening (Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers) - 3:28
[7] Full Moon and Empty Arms (Buddy Kaye, Ted Mossman, Sergei Rachmaninoff) - 3:26
[8] Where Are You? (Harold Adamson, Jimmy McHugh) - 3:37
[9] What'll I Do (Irving Berlin) - 3:21
[10] That Lucky Old Sun (Haven Gillespie, Beasley Smith) - 3:39

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bob Dylan - Vocals, Producer

Daniel Fornero - Trumpet
Tony Garnier - Upright Bass
Larry G. Hall - Trumpet
Dylan Hart - French Horn
Donnie Herron - Pedal Steel Guitar
Alan Kaplan - Trombone
Stu Kimball - Guitar
Andrew Martin - Trombone
Joseph Meyer - French Horn
George Receli - Percussion
Charlie Sexton - Guitar
Francisco Torres - Trombone

Jack Frost - Producer
Al Schmitt - Recording, Mixing
Steve Genewick - Assistant Engineering
Doug Sax - Mastering
Geoff Gans - Album Design
John Shearer - Photography
D. I. Harper - Horns Arrangement, Conductor

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Other people's songs have long been a staple for Bob Dylan, who first made his name in Greenwich Village by singing folk songs in the early '60s and often returned to old tunes as the years rolled by. Sometimes, he'd dip into the pre-WWII collection of standards known as the Great American Songbook, peppering set lists with unexpected selections as early as the '80s and even covering Dean Martin's "Return to Me" for The Sopranos in 2001, and he's made no secret of his affection for old-fashioned crooning on the records he's made since 2001's Love and Theft, but even with this long history of overt affection for pre-rock & roll pop, the existence of 2015's Shadows in the Night might come as a surprise. Shadows in the Night finds the songwriter whose work marks the divide where artists were expected to pen their own material finding sustenance in the Great American Songbook, with every one of its songs recorded at some point by Frank Sinatra. Its songs are old and Shadows in the Night is appropriately a defiantly old-fashioned album: a record the way they used to make them, long before Dylan had a recording contract of his own. Archaic though it may be - it's a mere ten songs lasting no longer than 35 minutes, just like all the long-players of the '50s - it's hard to call it musty, not when Dylan invested considerable energy in adapting these songs to the confines of his five-piece road band. Occasionally, this roadhouse crew is augmented by horns but the brass coloring bleeds into the sweet, mournful slide of Donnie Herron's pedal steel, accentuating that these renditions aren't nostalgic covers but reflections of Dylan's present. His voice shows gravelly signs of wear but he knows how to use his weathered instrument to its best effect, concentrating on the cadence of the lyrics and digging deep into their emotional undercurrent. In that sense, Shadows in the Night is a truer Sinatra tribute than the stacks of smiling, swinging empty tuxes snapping along to "It Had to Be You," for Dylan inhabits these songs like an actor, just like Frank did way back when. What Dylan is saluting is not the repertoire, per se - none of these songs is heavily associated with the Chairmen of the Board - but rather the mournful intimacy of Sinatra's "saloon" songs, the records he made to be played during the pitch black of the night. Four of the songs here can be found on 1957's Where Are You?, one of the very best of its kind, and that connection accentuates how Dylan has made a saloon song album with a band that could be heard at a saloon: just a guitar quintet, taking a moment to breathe, sigh, and perhaps weep. The fact that the feel is so richly idiosyncratic is a testament to just how well he knows these tunes, and these slow, winding arrangements are why Shadows in the Night feels unexpectedly resonant: it's a testament to how deeply Dylan sees himself in these old songs.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Releasing a record of standards covers is not a new or innovative concept. Rod Stewart pulled it off to great effect at the beginning of this century. Lady Gaga dropped her own takes from the Great American Songbook with Tony Bennett last year. Hell, even Sir Paul McCartney has taken a crack at it. Yet fans were still a little bewildered when Bob Dylan announced that he would release his own record of standards tunes.

For those who haven’t listened to any of Dylan’s recent records, the years have not exactly been kind to his voice. To call it gravelly would be generous, so it wouldn’t seem like a natural fit for this material. Then there’s the general reputation of the standards record as a method to combat inferior or diminished songwriting ability, a charge that no one would ever dream of leveling against Dylan. It’s all reason enough to wonder why, and why now.

As it turns out, the reasoning is quite simple: “All through the years, I’ve heard these songs being recorded by other people and I’ve always wanted to do that,” Dylan revealed to AARP. “I just like these songs and feel I can connect with them.” You can chalk it up as another instance of one of the most capricious artists in pop music history doing what he felt like. Take it or leave it.

For all the worry about Dylan tackling material popularized by the great Frank Sinatra, the most delightful surprise of Shadows In The Night is Dylan’s own voice. Due to the sparse, stripped-down arrangement of the music, there’s fortunately no place for him to hide, and his singing fits these songs much better than you might expect. Each of the tracks on this record carries a melancholy bent that Dylan wraps himself in. The weight of his experience is present in every line, every vocal tic, and every exhale.

He’s not trying to be Sinatra, filling the room with his presence; nevertheless, Dylan commands your attention. This is never truer than on “Autumn Leaves” when the music is pulled down low and the tempo slows to a near-crawl. The only moment he ever even veers toward the bombastic is at the very tail end of the final track, “That Lucky Old Sun.” The record was supposedly recorded live, lending a discernible authenticity to the weight of emotion in Dylan’s sometimes-frail, sometimes-raspy delivery.

Listeners can spend a lifetime attempting to keep Dylan confined to a series of preconceived notions, but Shadows In The Night is just an example of how he’ll continue to defy them.

Corbin Reiff - Feb 3, 2015
© Copyright 2015 Onion Inc.



It's about time Bob Dylan sings the standards. As an aging rock legend, he's entitled to one holiday record and a crack or two at the Great American Songbook; with 2009's Christmas From the Heart, a surprising continuation of his late-career hot streak, he checked the former box. On Shadows in the Night, the follow-up to 2012's excellent Tempest, the master songwriter plays interpreter, tackling 10 sentimental ballads recorded by Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Producing under his Jack Frost pseudonym, Dylan ditches the orchestral fanfare for a more lonesome-cowboy style, with little more than acoustic bass, pedal steel, guitar and brushed percussion.

And, of course, that voice - one as famously divisive as Sinatra's was universally loved. Over time, Dylan's nasal wail has become a creaky bleat that he artfully wields on record, yet uses onstage to render his classics unrecognizable. But here, there's little melody mangling. Beginning with the noirish opener "I'm a Fool to Want You," he enunciates, sustains fraying notes and softens his Bob-ness just enough. He never comes close to Ol' Blue Eyes' cocked-fedora cool or silky masculinity, but he's a 73-year-old chameleon for whom "crooner" is just one disguise. Even when he's a little rough, stretching hoarse syllables on "Full Moon and Empty Arms" or straining for high notes on "Where Are You?," he's still smoother than many might expect.

None of this is that unexpected, though. Dylan has always loved American mythology and all things archaic, and his best songs on recent albums have been rooted in pre-rock pop. When he gets wistful on "The Night We Called It a Day" or grabs hold of moonbeams on the South Pacific favorite "Some Enchanted Evening," he's natural and sincere.

Making the most of Capitol's Studio B - a Los Angeles landmark where Sinatra recorded - Dylan captures his band live, with stirring intimacy. As curator, he gets credit for avoiding obvious hits like "Stardust" and "Fly Me to the Moon," instead picking "Why Try to Change Me Now?" and the show-stopping closer, "That Lucky Old Sun," an old sufferer's plea for relief. It's one that Dylan clearly relates to and, over tasteful brass, the erstwhile bard of '60s counterculture lets some elderly rawness creep in, singing like a guy who has seen it all and found truth in timeless poetry that belongs to everyone.

Kenneth Partridge - February 03, 2015
© 2015 Billboard.com



Nobody asked Bob Dylan to record an album of old standards popularized by Frank Sinatra. Not even the 50,000 randomly chosen AARP The Magazine subscribers who found a free copy of Shadows in the Night in their mailboxes earlier this month. Then again, nobody asked Dylan to “go electric,” hole up with The Band in the basement of a pink house, or embark on a Never Ending Tour, either. Dylan has spent his entire career out of step with the rest of us — either prophetically ahead or anachronistically behind — to which we owe a sizable tract of our musical and cultural landscape. So, it’s with a certain faith that we follow Dylan once more, believing that going back in time through these old songs might lead us someplace new. After all, as he once sang, “The future for me is already a thing of the past.”

By giving away Shadows in the Night to senior citizens and conducting his lone album rollout interview through AARP rather than his customary Rolling Stone exclusive, Dylan may seem content to rekindle these songs for the social security set. Given the diversity of his audience, however, this record could very well introduce these songs — some dating as far back as the Roaring Twenties — to younger generations of listeners. The remarkable feat here is that Dylan has managed to make Depression- and WWII-era songs somewhat accessible to new audiences. Shadows in the Night’s appeal owes nothing to nostalgia or trends in antiquing; these songs resonate or fall flat on their own merits.

Dylan’s wisdom shows in his song selection. He’s opted to craft an album rather than curate a sampler. Consequently, themes of pining, loneliness, and love kindled, lost, or enduring cast long shadows throughout the record. “There’s nothing contrived in these songs,” explains Dylan. “There’s not one false word in any of them. They’re eternal.” He speaks about these songs with the same reverence he once held for the ancient secrets he spent his youth unlocking in folk songs. It’s hard to deny that there is also a certain timelessness capsuled within several of these melodies and lyrics. When red and gold “Autumn Leaves” drift by a window, a cumbersome heart sees only “your lips, the summer kisses, the sunburned hands I used to hold.” On “What’ll I Do”, another broken figure asks, “What’ll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to?” In a rare instance of love going the distance (“Why Try to Change Me Now”), we hear a playful pledge: “You know I’ll love you till the moon’s upside down.” And why not? Every woman these songs long, lust, and ache for seems to have hung the moon.

That timelessness doesn’t mean that Dylan tries to sell us the songs he found as-is. No, much of Shadow’s command — and a great deal of its surprising accessibility — stems from Dylan’s unorthodox restoration work. Instead of sanding down the rust or touching up the paint on these antiquities, he strips them clean of yesteryear’s lush orchestration and flashy adornments to find their cores — what makes them work for all eras. For instance, the movie score string section of “I’m a Fool to Want You” gets replaced by some simple pedal steel, which flickers to illuminate a streetlight or cast a soft glow in the corners of a room where our fool torments himself over a woman he can be with but never truly have. On “Stay with Me”, that same spare accompaniment now bolsters Dylan as he marches toward salvation, be it religious or just a woman prepared to once again give him shelter from the storm. Even on “That Lucky Old Sun”, which boasts a horn section, it’s clear that the arrangements are backdrops, accents, or at most allies to the troubled minds and hearts of Dylan’s protagonists.

Dylan’s voice should by all rights be a liability on songs once sung by Sinatra. Rest assured, he has nothing on Ol’ Blue Eyes. But his vocals, less ragged than usual, fit the mood of this record better than expected, lending an everyman quality to these sentiments. We can hear ourselves — our own longing — as he wishes for his lover on “Full Moon and Empty Arms”. He conjures a sweet, self-deprecating tenderness on “Why Try to Change Me Now” that we’d all strive for should we be lucky enough to find love that endures. Even as his voice wavers and gives out during his pleas to “wash all my troubles away” on “That Lucky Old Sun”, we don’t hear a voice straining but rather the rapture of a hopeful prayer that deserves to be answered.

“I love these songs, and I’m not going to bring any disrespect to them,” promises Dylan. “To trash those songs would be sacrilegious.” He’s true to his word on this album. While Shadows in the Night may ultimately be remembered as a brief detour on Dylan’s larger journey, it’d be a shame to dismiss this collection as a mere novelty or flight of whimsy. If nothing else, Dylan reminds us that men have been wrestling in the shadows with the complexities of the human heart long before we got here. Again, timeless.

Matt Melison - February 13, 2015
© 2007 - 2015 Consequence of Sound



It’s obviously up against some stiff competition from lingerie adverts and festive albums that came with free Christmas cards, but there’s an argument that Shadows in the Night may be the most improbable moment yet in Bob Dylan’s latterday career. By releasing a collection of standards from the Great American Songbook, Dylan, presumably inadvertently, joins in a trend begun 14 years ago by Robbie Williams. Ever since Williams proved that you could sell 7m copies of Swing When You’re Winning to an audience who’d never previously evinced much interest in the work of Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer, the Great American Songbook album has become a kind of sine qua non among rock stars of a certain vintage. They’ve all been at it, from Paul McCartney to Carly Simon to Linda Ronstadt. Rod Stewart seemed to treat the whole business less like a canny career move than a terrible endurance test to inflict on the general public. By the time he released his fifth Great American Songbook collection, you got the feeling that even the most indefatigable fan of the jazzy standard was on the floor tearfully pleading for mercy, and in danger of developing a nervous twitch brought on by the opening chords of Mack the Knife.

However, Dylan has latterly made a career out of doing the exact opposite of what most of his peers do. They dutifully tour their big hits, or perform classic albums in order; he takes to the stage and either brilliantly reinterprets his back catalogue or wilfully mangles it beyond repair, depending on whether you’re the kind of critic who gets whole paragraphs out of a change of syllabic emphasis in the lyrics of All Along the Watchtower or an audience member who’s heard three-quarters of Like a Rolling Stone without realising it’s Like a Rolling Stone. They make albums that cravenly attempt to conjure up the atmosphere of their best-loved classic works; he makes albums that conjure up a world before Bob Dylan existed – filled with music that sounds like blues or rockabilly or country from an age when pop was as yet untouched by his influence.

The latter is one of the reasons that Shadows in the Night works. Most Great American Songbook albums feel grafted on to the artist’s career: too obviously glommed together as a money-making exercise or a means of tiding them over when inspiration fails to strike. By contrast, Shadows in the Night sounds entirely of a piece with the albums Dylan has been making for the last decade and a half. Performed by his current touring band and produced by Dylan himself – rather more beautifully than you might expect, given his reputation for bashing everything out in the studio as quickly as possible – it glides languidly along on bowed double bass and waves of pedal steel, occasionally gently supported by pillowy, muted brass. The playing is full of lovely, subtle touches: the guitar line that shivers in the background of Autumn Leaves’ opening lines; the moment three minutes into I’m a Fool to Want You when the music momentarily loses its rhythmic pulse as Dylan sings “I can’t get along without you”, as if it’s on the verge of collapse. If the album in its entirety sounds more monotone in pace than its immediate predecessors – Dylan’s drummer is frequently relegated to occasionally tapping a hi-hat, or banished from the studio entirely – any of its tracks could have been slipped on to Modern Times or Tempest without provoking puzzlement among listeners.

Certainly, the album fits perfectly with what you might call Dylan’s latterday persona, the grizzled old geezer unveiled on 1997’s Time Out of Mind, either sentimental or growling at the world to get off his lawn; “trying to get to heaven,” as the song of the same name put it, “before they close the door”. Whether that’s a part Dylan is playing or an accurate representation of what he’s like in his 70s is a moot point, but the songs on Shadows in the Night have been chosen – usually from less well-thumbed chapters of the Great American Songbook – to suit the character. Their lyrical tone is usually remorseful and lovelorn – The Night We Called It a Day, What’ll I Do, Full Moon and Empty Arms – and even when it isn’t, it ends up sounding that way because of Dylan’s delivery. His version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening takes a song about a burgeoning romance and ferrets out the misery buried in the lyrics. “Fly to her side and make her your own/ Or all through your life you may dream all alone,” he sings, but there’s a rueful quality to his voice that undercuts the carpe diem sentiment and a song cautioning the listener not to miss their chances suddenly becomes a song about missed chances.

A lot has been written about the state of Dylan’s voice in recent years, but if any songs suit a ruined voice, they’re those assembled here. Most of their authors were half Dylan’s age when they wrote them, but they sounded much older: everything is suffused with world-weariness and regret. The irony is that Dylan’s vocals on Shadows in the Night sound “better” in the conventional sense than they have in years, presumably because he’s singing softly – crooning, if you will. There’s certainly nothing here that resembles the opening of Tempest’s Pay in Blood, where a combination of rage and whatever havoc has been visited on his larynx over the years left him sounding like the frontman of Autopsy or Disembowelment, and what came out wasn’t words but a terrifying, incomprehensible growl. Still, such things are relative. His voice is still cracked and catarrhal and occasionally ventures wildly off pitch, usually when he tries to hold the songs’ long, dramatic, final notes. It doesn’t matter: it fits, as if the hard-won experience of the lyrics has been etched on his throat.

Dylanologists could doubtless tell you a lot about the relationship between the songs here and his own oeuvre: you suspect they’ll have a field day with the religious overtones of Stay With Me. To say that all seems besides the point isn’t to rubbish their close reading and study, which at its best is genuinely illuminating. It’s merely to suggest that Shadows in the Night works as an unalloyed pleasure, rather than a research project. It may be the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Dylan’s made since Time Out of Mind. He’s an unlikely candidate to join the serried ranks of rock stars tackling standards: appropriately enough, given that Frank Sinatra sang all these songs before him, he does it his way, and to dazzling effect.

Alexis Petridis - Thursday 29 January
© 2015 Guardian News and Media



If Bob Dylan had recorded Shadows In The Night, his new collection of 10 songs associated with Frank Sinatra, at any time before now, it wouldn’t have been right. These songs are so lived-in and well-worn; they weren’t written for a young man to sing. They’re difficult and a lot more tricky and nuanced than any of the other songs Dylan’s interpreted before this, and if he’d taken them on earlier, he may not have been up to the task and given in to the easy seduction of ironic delivery or parody. Or, even if he’d delivered them as respectfully and lovingly as he obviously does on every one of the 10 performances on this album, his fans may have thought that Dylan was messing with them again with another perverse caprice designed to see just how far they would bend. But, that’s not what’s going on with Shadows In The Night, for a good part of Dylan’s magic and continued appeal has to do with how he has always known not just how to sing, but what to sing. As a young man, when he interpreted Woody Guthrie’s off-the-cuff reports from the world of dungarees and dust, it felt right and made perfect sense in the same way that his singing these Sinatra standards makes sense today.

For a lot of people under the age of 40, Frank Sinatra is as remote, distant and mythological a figure as William Shakespeare. For kids of Dylan’s generation, his influence was inescapable. In his time, he was called a lot of things—Swoonatra, Chairman of the Board—but when the pressed dubbed him “the voice” early on in his career, that was the label that stuck. And what a voice it was. So unlike Bob Dylan’s voice, and yet both men shared an uncanny sense of phrasing and ways of subtly stretching syllables to convey emotion and meaning that was remarkably similar.

It’s impossible to believe that this is something that has been lost on Bob Dylan. And, while Dylan certainly lacks Sinatra’s trademark smooth delivery, he is his equal in terms of finessing the emotions and meanings suggested by a lyric. It’s quite a task Dylan set for himself with this project. These songs are like mountains; they are absolutely formidable. They are so familiar and the echo of Sinatra’s voice will always hover over them. I don’t think I could count the times I’ve listened to “Wee Small Hours” and “Where Are You?” when I’ve been feeling blue. Heartbroken and blown wide open with pain, Sinatra sang every one of those songs like his life depended on it. After listening to them again in preparation for this review, I was reminded of how impossibly high he set the bar for anyone else who decided to take on these songs. Realizing that they simply couldn’t be improved upon, Bob Dylan must have had something else in mind when he decided to record them himself.

He may have had a record of his own that he wanted to set straight. I remember the line in Don’t Look Back where he tells a reporter that he’s as good a singer as Caruso. When I first heard him say that, I thought he was taking the piss, but over the years, I’ve come to realize not only that he was serious, but that he might be right. Singing the songs he takes on here could be viewed as a dare, for no matter how lush the arrangements or unique the instrumentation, any recording of these standards will be judged on the quality of the voice that sings them. By inference, then, Dylan has put himself in a position where the focus is necessarily on his singing above anything else on Shadows In The Night. To his credit, Dylan’s voice is featured front and center in the mix. Thinking about it, it’s not that surprising. It’s been more than a decade since he strapped on a guitar in concert. On the last tour, he spent most of his time center stage, singing his heart out. It was almost as if he was preparing us for the reborn singer that we hear on this record. Maybe it’s that after performing in so many different guises over the years, it’s only now that we are finally getting the chance to hear Dylan’s voice, naked and with nowhere to hide.

Listening to Shadows In The Night is a surprisingly powerful experience. If you let go of your expectations when he sings “The Night We Called It A Day” and really soak in it, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that with Dylan, as with Sinatra, it’s always been about his voice. From the beginning, it has been Dylan’s most powerful asset, and the people who have simply called Bob Dylan a great songwriter whose works are best performed by others have missed out on something essential. His songs wouldn’t be one-tenth as powerful and true as they come across if his voice was more pleasing, more golden and silky smooth. Who’d have believed a word of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ if he had sung it like Pat Boone?

Depending on your perspective, one of the most continually interesting—or distressing—things about Dylan’s music is how his singing voice has changed and adapted over the years. He’s always taken a fearless approach to singing and has cast his voice so far out on a limb so many times that some crashes and burns have been inevitable. The results haven’t always been pretty, but I’d venture that Bob Dylan at his most vocally eccentric and grating is far more interesting than any of the pitch-perfect dross that passes off as singing these days.

As a master of story and an entertainer, Dylan has always known that a raconteur needs to use every resource at his disposal to get his message across. From very early on, he seems to have understood that the quality of his voice was just as important as his lyrics when sharing a song. Perhaps his greatest gift to music has been his ability to create a persona with his voice that could make his songs come to life and express a will of their own. The bucolic voice that sang the songs on Nashville Skyline perfectly reflected the reality of the happily married young man who wrote them. When Dylan sang “Tonight, I’m Going To Stay With You,” we felt the love and believed him. We never doubted the sincerity of the pain and hurt that the voice of the Blood On The Tracks singer shared any more than we were skeptical of the faith that moved the voice we heard on Slow Train Coming. But, of any of the voices Dylan has ever sung with, his current one is, hands down, the most unaffected and truthful.

It communicates an approach to singing that began to ripen around the time Love and Theft came out in 2001. It is the voice of the old guy who said he would just as happily sit and sing Charley Patton songs for those who cared to listen as write anything new. Love And Theft was the first record he produced himself (as Jack Frost) and in retrospect, it’s impossible not to wish that he’d done it much earlier. If you listen back, there’s a palpable hedging and fear of vocal imperfection in otherwise very good records like Oh Mercy, Under The Red Sky and Time Out Of Mind that makes the songs somehow less than they could have been. Dylan’s evolution as a singer hasn’t let up, and ever since Love And Theft, the strange beaten beauty that has always lived in his voice has been captured without excuse or apology. It’s an approach that has brought Dylan’s music to a new level of expression.

There simply aren’t any other artists of his generation—except for perhaps Leonard Cohen—who have continued to release music of such depth and quality. Ragged and scorched, the bare humanity of his voice opens a window that blows in dark and upsetting ideas that hover for days. Every rasp and pop from his throat gives the songs a physical presence that renders his lyrics into aural sculptures and their imagery into tapestries. They’re so weighty that they could be caught in a net and hung like paintings in a museum. They’re almost too powerful to take in any other way but a sip at a time. If you heard how Bob Dylan and his band performed the songs from Tempest on his last tour, you’ll have some idea of the approach to a song he’s taken with Shadows In The Night. On it, just like on the last tour, something absolutely incredible has been reached, something ineffable that aches with beauty.

Dylan is now singing with the voice of the last man standing. It’s a voice that accepts what life has become and moves nimbly and reverently within the grace of the intonation that God has left him with. Louis Armstrong is the only other American singer who has ever communicated as much soul, such complex weather worn textures and colors within such a limited range. But, the appeal of Dylan’s voice isn’t simply that it has a lot of miles on it. Weathered voices are a dime a dozen. Anybody can beat hell out of their vocal chords if they set their minds to it. To be able to sing like Bob Dylan sings on Shadows In The Night is no accident of lifestyle. You have to have something far deeper than that going on to sing like he does here.

Every performance on Shadows In The Night expresses a level of vocal maturity and intuition that he’s never quite reached before. The moods Dylan creates are so vivid. When he sings “Stay With Me,” you can taste the cold, day-old coffee and you don’t have to be told that the beds are unmade and the streets outside are rainy. When Dylan interprets “That Lucky Old Son,” you can feel the essence of what he’s learned from everything he has listened to and sung for the last half a century. All of the deep work he’s done to reverently internalize the sound of every growl, yodel and croon he’s ever heard pays off in spades on every one of these songs. Play “Autumn Leaves.” It’s the kind of song that can test any singer’s mettle, and Dylan doesn’t disappoint. It is as rich, relaxed and assured a version as I’ve ever heard.

Musically speaking, all of the songs on Shadows In The Night never come off as anything less than fabulous. Dylan’s current touring band is the best he’s ever had, and it’s wonderful to hear how when given fresh material, they rise to the challenge. The way they boil down the complexity of the original orchestral arrangements to suit a five-piece band is astounding. Tony Garnier’s stand-up bass and Donnie Herron’s lap steel that fills in for the original Nelson Riddle string arrangements deserve special mention. The whole band plays like they have nothing to prove, but even though they maintain a low profile, if you tune in and really listen, the instrumentation is as fine and nuanced as you could hope to hear anywhere.

Shadows In The Night should be remembered as one of Bob Dylan’s greatest albums that extends the story of American music he began telling us with Self Portrait that carried through the albums Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong. It’s not rock and roll. It’s not party music, but Shadows In The Night is better than I can find words to convince with. It makes me think that anyone else who’s been thinking of putting out a record this year should just close up shop, go on vacation and wait until 2016. The light that shines out of Shadows In The Night is blinding. When Dylan flexes and fires on all cylinders like this, nobody else has a chance.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Douglas Heselgrave - February 3, 2015
© 2015 Paste Media Group



Is Bob Dylan trolling us? His 36th studio album, Shadows in the Night, is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. It’s an idea seemingly as weird as his phlegmy Christmas album or his leering Victoria’s Secret ad. In the '60s, Sinatra was arguably for squares; entrenched in Vegas and disdainful of rock'n'roll (which he had called "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear"), he represented the establishment against which the counterculture was kicking, and that made him a kind of anti-Dylan. And then there’s the fact that crooning is all about the voice—making it smooth yet expressive, agile yet graceful. Just as Dylan’s songwriting exploded the notion of the tightly structured pop tune, his voice has roundly rejected the notion that pop singers must sound pretty.

While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Dylan has in fact been teasing this project for years, if not decades. A few of the songs on Shadows in the Night have appeared sporadically in his setlists since the 1990s, and in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan even professed his fandom for the Chairman of the Board, even if he subtly admitted that the crooner wasn’t exactly a popular figure among the folkies in the Village: "When Frank sang ["Ebb Tide"], I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much."

In other words, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, but more than that, Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting. He’s not interested in aping the man’s vocal style (which would be laughable) or retreading his signature tunes (which would be redundant). There’s no "Strangers in the Night" or "My Way" on here, nor is there a single dooby-dooby-doo. Instead, Dylan digs deep, picking personal favorites rather than obvious hits. "Some Enchanted Evening" and "That Lucky Old Sun" may be familiar to many listeners, but others, like "Stay With Me" and "Where Are You?" are more obscure, which allows Dylan to put his stamp on them without sounding like he’s falling back on that late-career cliché: the standards album.

Rather than mimic the robust orchestral arrangements that define Sinatra’s catalog, Dylan strips these songs down considerably. According to a statement on his website, he’s not covering them, but "uncovering" them: "Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day." There are some gentle horn charts on "The Night We Called It a Day", but they’re generally unobtrusive, included less for dramatic effect and more for simple ambience. His small band accompanies him sensitively and sympathetically, often playing so quietly that it sounds like Dylan is singing a cappella. The lead instrument here is Donny Herron’s pedal steel, which is so crucial to the album’s moonlit ambience that it might as well hang the stars from the night sky.

And what do you know, Dylan can actually sing. Without sounding overly reverent, he croons persuasively, especially on "Why Try to Change Me Now". That song, recorded by Sinatra in 1959 for his album No One Cares, resonates powerfully on Shadows in the Night, with a performance so assured you might think Dylan wrote it himself. And perhaps that’s why Dylan gravitates to these tunes. Never the most confessional songwriter—he dodges more than he professes—he has remained guarded about his inner life, making him both the most studied songwriter of the rock era and also the least known. But "Why Try to Change Me Now" may be one of the most revealing tunes he has sung in the twentieth century, allowing him to settle into the role of the lovable curmudgeon, a man who understands he’s a mess but is too old to change. It’s the best reason he’s given for recording this album.

Because these songs seemingly reveal some new facets of Dylan’s character and celebrity, they comprise a fascinating and conceptually rich object whose meaning will be debated and dissected for years to come. In particular Shadows in the Night asks us to hear these crooner anthems as folk tunes, as though Sinatra was Seeger with a tux and a stint at the Sands. While ignoring social or political dilemmas, they speak to certain emotional conundrums common to everyone: how to live with love and heartbreak, how to survive on whimsy and regret. Trying to explain the nature of attraction on "Some Enchanted Evening", Dylan offers a sly wink as he sings, "Fools offer reasons, wise men never try." Especially in such a popular tune, the line takes on fresh gravity in the context of Dylan’s career, as though he could be quoting one of his own songs.

And yet.

Shadows in the Night may pose some compelling questions for the Bobophiles who scrutinize every line and every word of every Dylan song, but for the more casual, less obsessive listener, it can be a bit of a snooze. The songs are well chosen and certainly revealing, but Dylan and his band play them all pretty much the same, sacrificing any sense of rhythm for stately ambience. Once they strike a mood on opener "I’m a Fool to Want You", they never stray from it. That gives Shadows a distinctive identity in Dylan’s catalog, but it also has a leveling effect. Each song hits the same tempo and strikes the same tone, so that swoon quickly turns somnambulant. As the album progresses, the songs sound more and more emotionally muted, as though this style of American pop songwriting was good only for providing ruminative ambience rather than sophisticated humor, feisty insight, or infectious rhythm. Say what you want about Sinatra, but at least the man could swing.

Stephen M. Deusner - February 3, 2015
© 2015 Pitchfork Media




As an encore at almost every show on his North American tour last fall, Bob Dylan performed an unlikely ballad: "Stay With Me," recorded by Frank Sinatra on a 1964 single and written for a 1963 film, The Cardinal, about a young priest who ascends to a post in the Vatican. Sinatra cut the song, a prayer for guidance, as if from on high, in orchestration as grand as papal robes. On this quietly provocative and compelling album, Dylan enters the words and melody — as he did onstage — like a supplicant, in a tiptoe baritone through streaks of pedal steel guitar that suggest the chapel-like quiet of a last-chance saloon. But Dylan's need is immediate, even carnal, and he pleads his case with a survivor's force, in a deep, shockingly clear voice that sounds like rebirth in itself. In stripping the song to pure, robust confession, Dylan turns "Stay With Me" into the most fundamental of Great American Songs: a blues.

Dylan transforms everything on Shadows in the Night — 10 slow-dance covers, mostly romantic standards from the pre-rock era of American popular songwriting — into a barely-there noir of bowed bass and throaty shivers of electric guitar. There are occasional dusky flourishes of brass (the moaning curtain of horns in "The Night We Called It a Day"), but the most prominent voice, other than Dylan's, is his steel guitarist Donny Herron's plaintive cries of Hawaiian and West Texas sorrow. Sinatra is a connecting presence: He recorded all of these songs, and Dylan made Shadows at the Capitol Records studio in Los Angeles where Sinatra did his immortal work for that label. Sinatra even co-wrote the first song, "I'm a Fool to Want You," in 1951. When Dylan crawls uphill through the line "To share a kiss that the devil has known," it is easy to hear Sinatra's then-tumultuous romance with Ava Gardner — along with echoes of the wounded desire Dylan left all over Blood on the Tracks.

Yet Shadows in the Night is less a tribute to Sinatra than a belated successor to Dylan's 1992 and '93 LPs of solo folk and blues covers, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong: a spare, restorative turn to voices that have, in some way, always been present in his own. "Autumn Leaves" and Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do" are the kind of ladies' choices Dylan surely played with his Fifties bands at school dances. "That Lucky Old Sun" (Number One for Frankie Laine in 1949) turned up in Dylan's early-Nineties set lists, but that's no surprise: Its near-suicidal resignation is not far from that of Blind Willie McTell's "Broke Down Engine," on World Gone Wrong, or Dylan's own "Love Sick," on 1997's Time Out of Mind.

The great shock here, then, is Dylan's singing. Dylan's focus and his diction, after years of drowning in sandpaper, evoke his late-Sixties poise and clarity on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline — also records of deceptive restraint and retrospect — with an eccentric rhythmic patience in the way he holds words and notes across the faint suggestions of tempo. It is not crooning. It is suspense: Dylan, at 73, keeping fate at arm's length as he looks for new lessons, nuance and solace in well-told tales.

Rating: 4 out of 5

David Fricke - February 3, 2015
RollingStone Issue 1228



Few things symbolize creative death as succinctly as the standards album, now a frequent terminal point for aging artists who seek to forestall the end of their productive output by capitalizing on the golden-hued nostalgia of bygone hits. Not so, of course, for Bob Dylan, who's made an entire career out of defying expectations, and continues to willfully resist classification and fogeyism, even on an album of which 50,000 free copies will be issued to randomly chosen AARP members. The standard Dylan inscrutability ends up turning what could have been a straightforward snooze—10 covers of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra—into another eccentric, quietly effective outing, building on themes of melancholy and loss amid the less bombastic corners of Ol' Blue Eyes's early oeuvre. The result is reminiscent of the eclectic traditionalism of Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour program, with the artist slipping into the role of ghostly, gently sinister crooner as effortlessly as he fleshed out the myth of the ethereal pre-corporate disc jockey.

The songs featured on Shadows in the Night are far from Sinatra's most recognizable material, more associated with the hazy, pre-modern era which preceded the singer's most familiar period of mid-century bravado, rooted in the smart, sentimental balladry of Tin Pan Alley. More concerned with these songs' workmanlike origins than any residual glamour which may surround them, Shadows in the Night fits logically into Dylan's post Time Out of Mind era, from the poetic plagiarisms of Love and Theft to the old-fashioned balladry of Modern Times and the equally demented Christmas in the Heart, tweaking and updating material in danger of drifting off anonymously into history.

The album maintains an elegiac tone throughout, as Dylan balances out any hints of winking self-awareness by freighting his new compositions with a heavy air of wistful sadness, applying a sonic palette of slide and softly strummed acoustic guitars. Lead single "Full Moon and Empty Arms" updates a 1945 Buddy Kaye-penned hit, itself structured around Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 2," while "Autumn Leaves" reinterprets Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert's "Les Feuilles Mortes," a commonly reworked piece that's appeared in a series of different permutations and languages. "That Lucky Old Sun," which experienced a famous chart battle in 1949, with versions by Sinatra, Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, and Louis Armstrong all receiving popular acclaim, gets another worthy revision here, its mournful work-song structure validated by the sounds of exhaustion in Dylan's crinkled voice.

Rather than settle for one more cheap jukebox tour through well-worn material, Shadows in the Night deepens the innate sorrow of these old tunes by establishing them on a long, irregular continuum, possessing the same inherent mutability as the folk songs of Dylan's early days. The result is a collective portrait of influence filtered down through the ages, working off the 73-year-old artist's running theme of sounds and styles shifting as they trace their way down through time, the voices changing while the sentiment remains the same.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Jesse Cataldo - February 2, 2015
© 2015 Slant Magazine



“NOSTALGIA IS death,” Bob Dylan once noted. While countless other contemporaries have recorded Great American Songbook collections, Shadows In The Night – Dylan’s
 contribution to the concept – is not, by any
 definition, a recreation of the past. There are no
 sweeping strings, no operatic background singers, no ukuleles or harp glissandi or tinkly cocktail pianos. If the songs here weren’t already known, any could easily fit on “Love And Theft” or Modern Times and nobody would blink if told these were Bob Dylan originals (think Bye And Bye or Beyond The Horizon). If Dylan’s presentation is similar to anyone’s, it’s Willie Nelson’s on his classic Stardust – both are understated, both utilise their road bands, both singers make the songs their own.

All 10 of Shadows… selections were previously recorded by Frank Sinatra, making it Bob’s tip of the tilted fedora to “Mr Frank”. In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan wrote of Sinatra’s version of Ebb Tide: “When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice – death, God and the universe, everything.” The same can be said for Dylan’s half-century of work. When he has on occasion made a misstep, it’s usually because he went against natural instincts and accepted bad advice. (See Empire Burlesque. And when Jack Frost – aka Bob – became the producer, consistent quality returned to his studio work from “Love And Theft” onwards.) While Sinatra and Dylan are separated by a generation, as well as style, both brought a naturalism to popular vocalising. For mid-century white singers, Sinatra shut down the Nelson Eddy school of stiff squaredom, while Dylan took it further and made it permissible for a voice not considered “pretty” to be valid. And both men are, of course, rooted in the blues.

Conventional wisdom often posits that while Dylan may be a unique vocal stylist, he’s not a ‘good’ singer. This is one of the lazier notions in pop music babble. In his youth, Dylan’s technique – his phrasing, breath control and emotive power – was exemplary. What he’s lost over the years is range and some of that oomph. While his studio voice has remained strong, his critics are credible when they argue that there are times in concert when he’s unlistenable and even die-hards find his erratic performances maddening. It’s one thing to improvise, to shift melodies and rewrite lyrics – it’s another to render songs completely unrecognisable. There have been moments when one wondered whether Dylan would ever carry a tune again. Then something like Shadows In The Night arrives and we remember that he is the king of the confounded expectation.

Which is to say that his singing on Shadows… is his best vocalising in years – in-studio or out. The audible regret on opener I’m A Fool To Want You is heartbreaking – Blood On The Tracks condensed in under five minutes. The accumulated miles in his perfectly imperfect voice and resignation in his pleading phrasing lifts album closer That Lucky Old Sun into realms unmatched save for the very best. His diaphragm-to-throat equilibrium is nearly flawless and when he wavers or doesn’t quite hit or hold the designated note, it’s in keeping with Bob’s lifetime fealty to artistic realism. He glides with the melodies and relaxes into them, enjoying the ride that these gems provide with the help of his road band and restrained horns. (Donnie Herron’s heart-tugging pedal steel functions as orchestration and he’s responsible for much of the album’s gorgeous sound.)

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As for the production, it not only perfectly serves the songs and singer with sensitivity, but is balm in an era of overwrought artificiality or its opposite cousin, land-of-the-twee Americana. Dylan explained Frost’s modus operandi in a press release. “It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded.” (Huzzahs to vet engineer Al Schmitt for flawlessly executing a daunting task.) Like such practitioners of the artistic process who allow for rough edges like Picasso or Thelonious Monk, Dylan’s handful of mistakes are part of his art – a human element in a corporate world that places a premium on assembly-line sameness. As Monk maintained, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”

Besides a handful of chestnuts, the song choices lean to the lesser known. “I don’t see myself as covering these songs… what me and my band are doing is uncovering them,” explains Dylan. Much will be made of the autumnal theme: from the age of the material (at least one stemming from 1923) to songs like Autumn Leaves and That Lucky Old Sun that address mortality. But this extraordinary record is more refreshing burst than last gasp and its timelessness speaks more to life than death. With lyrics scribed by pros like Irving Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein and wrapped in Dylan’s musical naturalism, thoughts that were first expressed in, say, 1952 (Why Try To Change Me Now) ring true in 2015 and odds are will do the same in 2052.

Speaking of Why Try To Change Me Now, it was literally tailor-made for Frank by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy. Furious at Columbia Records’ attempts to commercialise him with material he considered unworthy, the song was Sinatra’s last for the label before he jumped ship for Capitol Records, where his collaboration with producer Nelson Riddle yielded sublime classics. “Why can’t I be more conventional? But that’s not for me,” Sinatra sang on Why Try To Change Me Now. “It was Sinatra’s way of saying no,” observed writer Mark Steyn of both song and message. “I’ll stick with the music and in the end the music will win.”

And yet again, so it has.

MOJO rating: 5 out of 5

Michael Simmons - February 6, 2015
mojo4music.com



Shadows In The Night is Bob Dylan's newest studio album, and marks the first new music from the artist since 2012's worldwide hit Tempest. Featuring ten tracks, the Jack Frost-produced album is the 36th studio set from Bob Dylan and marks the first new music from the artist since 2012's worldwide hit Tempest.

Regarding the repertoire on this album, Bob Dylan commented, "It was a real privilege to make this album. I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band. That's the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day."

Bob Dylan's five previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while "Love and Theft" continued Dylan's Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album. Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist's most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist's first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies. Tempest received unanimous worldwide critical acclaim upon release and reached the Top 5 in 14 countries, while the artist s globe-spanning concert tours of the past few years have heavily emphasized that album s singular repertoire. Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records around the world.

Amazon.com



Shadows in the Night is the thirty-sixth studio album by Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records on February 3, 2015. The album consists of covers of traditional pop standards made famous by Frank Sinatra, chosen by Dylan himself. On January 23, 2015, it was announced that 50,000 free copies would be given away to randomly selected AARP The Magazine readers. Prior to the album's release, Dylan made "Full Moon and Empty Arms" available for free streaming online on May 13, 2014. The album has received positive reviews from critics for its unexpected and strong song selection as well as the strength of Dylan's performance.

Shadows in the Night received critical acclaim from music critics, upon its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 82, which indicates "universal acclaim", based on 31 reviews. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: "The fact that the feel is so richly idiosyncratic is a testament to just how well he knows these tunes, and these slow, winding arrangements are why Shadows in the Night feels unexpectedly resonant: it's a testament to how deeply Dylan sees himself in these old songs."

Kenneth Partridge, in Billboard magazine, gave the album four out of five stars, noting that Dylan was "singing like a guy who has seen it all and found truth in timeless poetry that belongs to everyone". Partridge also observed, "Dylan has always loved American mythology and all things archaic, and his best songs on recent albums have been rooted in pre-rock pop. When he gets wistful on "The Night We Called It a Day" or grabs hold of moonbeams on the South Pacific favorite "Some Enchanted Evening", he's natural and sincere." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian praised the album, stating that "it may be the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Dylan's made since Time Out of Mind". Jesse Cataldo of Slant Magazine thought that the album "deepens the innate sorrow of these old tunes by establishing them on a long, irregular continuum, possessing the same inherent mutability as the folk songs of Dylan's early days".

Writing for The A.V. Club, Corbin Reiff summed up the unexpected album by writing, "You can chalk it up as another instance of one of the most capricious artists in pop music history doing what he felt like. Take it or leave it." Paste magazine critic Douglas Heselgrave stated that "Every performance on Shadows in the Night expresses a level of vocal maturity and intuition that he's never quite reached before." David Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine described the album as "quietly provocative and compelling", observing that "Dylan transforms everything on Shadows in the Night into a barely-there noir of bowed bass and throaty shivers of electric guitar". Jon Pareles of The New York Times gave the album a positive review, writing: "Mr. Dylan presents yet another changed voice: not the wrathful scrape of his recent albums, but a subdued, sustained tone." Parales further stated: "Even when it falters, Shadows in the Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.

In his review for The Telegraph, Neil McCormick gave the album five out of five stars, describing the work as "quite gorgeous" and "spooky, bittersweet, mesmerisingly moving" with "the best singing from Dylan in 25 years". McCormick also praised Dylan's "delicate, tender and precise" singing that somehow "focuses the songs, compelling listeners to address their interior world in a way glissando prettiness might disguise".

The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling 22,031 in its first week. At the age of 73, Bob Dylan is the oldest male solo artist to chart at number one in the UK. Dylan also holds the record for the longest span between number-one albums with 49 years, having first topped the chart with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1965.

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