Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and some seriously kickass music.
The United States has been the muse for thousands of songs, whether they be celebratory, critical, or somewhere in between.
Today, in honor of our independence, I’m listing off some of my favorite albums that are unmistakably American. Continue reading
I have played this record only once besides this listen, and it was the day I got it, after which it was quickly shelved. I remember it being pretty terrible, but I don’t exactly remember why. I’m being reminded a little bit now, though. While it maintains largely the same format as Saved, the arrangements, which were so subtle on Slow Train Coming and so masterfully executed on Saved, are sloppy in comparison. This backing band lacks both the control and the exuberance of the groups that accompanied Dylan on his last two outings. It crosses the line into hokey territory quite often, and it doesn’t help the songwriting.
While Slow Train Coming saw Dylan expanding his folk palette with progressive rock and gospel colors, Saved is almost exclusively a gospel record. The restraint shown by its predecessor is often shed entirely, and background singers, Hammond organs, pounded pianos, and raucous tempos are par for the course here, with Dylan himself even improvising vocal fills between lines like he’s wearing a robe and swaying along in the choir box. Continue reading
Just about everybody thinks of Slow Train Coming as Bob Dylan’s first record after becoming a Christian*. And while that’s certainly true, and while that makes it a milestone, it often undermines the value of the music therein, which is understatedly magnificent.
After the heavy intimacy of Blood on the Tracks, Dylan cowrote an album (a first for him, I believe) that returned to the outlaw hymns of John Wesley Harding, raging against the establishment and racism put to acoustic guitar, drums, and a violin, which proves a fitting companion for Dylan’s scraping guitar, ragged vocals, and howling harmonica.
As I had mentioned earlier, breakup records are an important pop music tradition, and Blood on the Tracks is the archetype for the genre. The record finds Dylan in the studio without the Band for the first time in years and returning to the lyric-heavy writing of his earlier material, leading to his first 7min+ running times since Blonde on Blonde.
Amidst a critical and commercial slump and rumors that he had no plans to record a new LP, CBS record execs (with Dylan’s blessing) set to making money off of their golden goose, leading to this two disc collection. The result is a truly worthwhile look at a proper genius’s full career, including cuts from just about every album he had released up to that point (excepting his debut, Times, and his critically panned Self Portrait) as well as seven unreleased tunes, including the sneering rocker Watching the River Flow and the legendary Quinn the Eskimo.
According to Wikipedia, Blonde on Blonde is the final album in what is largely considered to be his Rock Trilogy. When I read that, I was shocked that I hadn’t noticed it before. While Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited have always struck me as different sides of the same coin, Blonde on Blonde seemed a different monster altogether.
Despite his affirmation of Highway 61’s significance as the trotting grounds of country blues legends, this album ends up being just as ironically titled as Bringing It All Back Home, on which Dylan brought just about nothing “Home,” but fled from his roots in a fury of rock bands and surrealism. In many ways, Highway 61 Revisited is Home’s Amnesiac–a further exposition on a previous album that had more to say than one groundbreaking album could say. Continue reading
On Bob Dylan’s first four releases, the production was incredibly simple–a man with an acoustic guitar (or piano, occasionally) and harmonica sang songs at a single microphone with no overdubs.
And then, Dylan lashed out.
Subterranean Homesick Blues starts with a single harmonica that is immediately joined by a drum set, bass guitar, piano, and no fewer than two electric guitars. And instead of the socially conscious lyrics that made him the Spokesman of a Generation, here he spits nonsensical couplets (Don’t follow leaders/watch the parking meters), and when he is being coherent, he’s railing against that Spokesman position.