Album Review: Bob Dylan, Triplicate

Deserved Nobel laureate Bob Dylan can do whatever the hell he likes, and the world will most certainly be a greyer place when he’s no longer in it, but this is hard work. Following on from Shadows In The Night and Fallen Angels, Dylan dips again into the classic American songbook and gifts us a triple album – an illegal manoeuvre since the Sandanista! amendment to the Geneva Convention – containing 30 songs across three, apparently, thematically sequenced discs.

Listening to this collection for the first time, one would think Dylan was in the middle of his under appreciated “jarred auld lad at a wedding” period. There is no way to get around the main problem here: Dylan’s voice doesn’t hold up against the Sinatras, Bennetts and Fitzgeralds that we would most associate with these songs. He valiantly reaches for notes that just aren’t there.

Take the version of ‘September Of My Years’ – all pedal steel and croaking, although it does have a certain appropriate melancholy. Then compare it to Sinatra’s reading from 1965 – carried on a glorious swell of strings, it makes you weep for memories you don’t even have.
Dylan’s band can’t be faulted but these songs cry out for orchestration of a grander sort. ‘I Could Have Told You’ is a genuinely affecting performance but it can’t hold a candle to the Nelson Riddle/Sinatra version from 1953. Better-known songs such as ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’, ‘As Times Goes By’ and ‘Stardust’ should just be avoided. All that being said, spend time with it and some of the mess swims into focus. The third disc is the strongest, finishing with a rather lovely ‘Why Was I Born?’

Perhaps Bobcats, including me, can take comfort from this thought. The last time Dylan went back to the well of his youth, for the good-in-places folk/blues covers of Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, he emerged with the mortality-baiting masterpiece Time Out Of Mind. Only a fool would bet against him pulling a similar rabbit out of this old hat.