Bob Dylan
SEE: Emma Swift – ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’: a Dylan tune comes of age in Emma’s hands
MY, BUT she knows how to get inside a song and bring out the emotional depth, the resonance, the beauty, does singer-songwriter Emma Swift. Coming out of Nashville, Tennessee, Emma is poised to release what is only her second LP, following her self-titled debut for Laughing Outlaw back some six years now. And this time …
SEE: Emma Swift’s gorgeous ‘Queen Jane Approximately’
AUSTRALIAN chanteuse, Nashville resident and partner of Robyn Hitchcock, Emma Swift has saddled up to ride into your hearts with the video for her cover of Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately.” Hell, it’s beautiful. She takes it for a deep spin towards Gene Clark country, and lays it down as a chiming weary tune, with 12-strings …
Album Review: Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways
The bard’s long-awaited album, the first of new material in eight years, burgeons with a young man’s enthusiasm but an older gentleman’s wisdom and experience. The ten tracks produce an image of world-weariness and superiority with gusto, of a benevolent arrogance from someone unaccustomed to it, Dylan seeming like a town crier with bags of …
Track: Bob Dylan – False Prophet
A release as surprising and enigmatic as the prior “I Contain Multitudes” and “Murder Most Foul”, “False Prophet” foreshadows Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways”. Although much is different across his three tracks of 2020, Dylan is reflective across the trio. Here though, he ponders with much gusto and “…last of the best” seems self-congratulatory in …
Classic Album: Bob Dylan – Oh Mercy
As the 80s drew to a close it was difficult to escape the conclusion that Bob Dylan‘s muse had been largely AWOL since 1976’s Desire. Since that album’s release there had certainly been allusions to greatness but it was usually by way of songs that Dylan chose to omit from shoddy albums. As a result, despite …
Not Forgotten: Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding
Music changed forever in 1967, primarily because in the wake of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was firmly established that the long player had finally wrestled the mantle of definitive medium for rock and roll statements from the single format. Sure, it was already in the pipeline anyway, as acts like Pink Floyd …
Not Forgotten: Bob Dylan – Christmas in the Heart
Ah, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart. Oh how music fans far and wide chuckled at the idea of one of the 20th Century’s song writing icons deciding that it would be a shrewd career move to release an album of traditional Christmas Carols and festive favourites. Down the decades Christmas albums in general have …
Classic Album: Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
Imagine the shock of hearing Highway 61 Revisited the first time in the mid 60s. You’re a Bob Dylan fan, you like his politicised songwriting as it fit in neatly with your ideals and opinions. Sure his material has become slightly less political over recent albums, but he’s still a great songwriter. You can even …
Blu-ray Review: Don’t Look Back
Musical documentaries tend to fall into two camps. Normally, they’re retrospective stories of band or artists, using interviews and archive footage. There’s also the concert film, which nowadays tend to feature the most main stream ‘pop’ular bands. In Don’t Look Back D.A. Pennebaker follows a young Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. It’s …
Not Forgotten – Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks
Blood On The Tracks is that rare thing, an album that deserves every word of praise heaped upon it. At this stage in his career Bob Dylan had done his best to shake off the oh-so cliched ‘voice of a generation’ tag. His mid 60s electric trilogy had been rightly celebrated, but it had made …