Swinging folk, rockabilly, slow-motion dance music: the master transcends early songs.
Because this is Bob Dylan, he didn’t just have himself filmed in the studio for his Corona streaming event two years ago and broadcast the whole thing live on the Internet like the others did. Instead, the songwriter placed himself in a smoky, dreamlike, black-and-white setting in a fictional club. Along with a masked playback band that included Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek.
The songs had already been recorded over several days, and now they are being released on SHADOW KINGDOM for the first time on disc (the worthwhile film just described, staged by Tel Aviv-born director Alma Har’el, is to follow). The songs are all from 1965 to 1989, the first half of Dylan’s career, but they sound a lot older here. Or to put it another way: they seem completely removed from the times, and thus logically contemporary again.
The fantastic “Queen Jane Approximately” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, exhilarated by the accordion, spring easily from the 60s, “Tombstone Blues” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” are more declaimed than sung, “What Was It You Wanted is laconic, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight is whimsical, and Forever Young has never been more beautiful or solemn. It sounds like swinging folk, rockabilly and magical slow-motion dance music – Dylan croonts and blows his harmonica. You can also see it on the cover, once again with the current artist photo.