Originally published in The Cambridge Student in 2015
“The songs didn’t come out of thin air” remarked Bob Dylan in a recent speech, referring loosely to the creative output that made him a such an iconic figure in modern music. In his long and varied career Dylan has channelled every facet of American music, from the folk of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, to the country of Nashville Skyline and the electrifying blues numbers on mid-1960s albums like Blonde and Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. He is adept at taking existing styles and blending them effortlessly. Shadows in the Night does not attempt to do such a thing, but does delve into an area of American music left hitherto relatively untouched by the great singer-songwriter: that of the Great American Songbook.
This is an album of traditional pop and jazz standards that all share some connection to Frank Sinatra. The big band and swing arrangements have, mercifully, been stylistically reworked by Dylan and his touring band. The pedal steel guitar is wistful, the bass lumbering yet mellow, the orchestral standards stripped down to sparser arrangements with pleasant results. The mood of the album is slow, brooding and occasionally dreary. But dig a little deeper and you will find a gentle, reserved beauty to the music. Pieces like ‘Full Moon and Empty Arms’ groan under the weight of heartache, the shifting chords maintaining a haunting quality throughout. The songs carry the essence of a rose-tinted era where the vicissitudes of romance were met with patience, courtesy and deference. Even the thirty-two-bar form sounds stately to the modern ear, so accustomed to the verse-chorus form.
Those unaccustomed to the current state of Dylan’s voice will probably find the vocals on the record a little croaky and thin. That said, they constitute what is unequivocally his best vocal work in many years. His weary voice seems much better suited to gentle crooning, with ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ and ‘I’m A Fool To Want You’ proving far more listenable than the guttural growls found on Tempest.
All too often Dylan’s name is associated with age of experimentation, free love and political upheaval. His early albums did light a political touchpaper and transform the shape of popular music indelibly, but he is, at heart, more conservative than most would imagine. By the time the 1960s was in full swing as a cultural phenomenon he had left the artistic melting pot of Greenwich Village for life in a country retreat, raising a family and making sentimental country records. It was a shock for those who saw him as the head of a new movement, and no surprise to those who knew him better. Pre-rock music has always been largest influence, as evidenced by the encyclopaedic knowledge he displays both in interviews and his memoir Chronicles. Much of what he injected into 1960s rock music was drawn from a rich appreciation of earlier compositions and traditionals: the pounding blues of Muddy Waters, the politicism of Woody Guthrie, the winding narratives of civil war folk ballads. As he said recently, all the songs “came out of traditional music”, and it’s hard to miss those lingering traces that run through his works. Shadows in the Night is merely another expression of his debt to earlier musical forms.
But for all this album could be said to represent, it’s not the kind of record that begs to be played end to end, time and time again. Critics have stumbled to pay lip service to everything Dylan has released since the renaissance that began with Time Out of Mind, but with hindsight Shadows in the Night will probably placed in the same bracket as other cover albums that fell a little flat, like Christmas in the Heart. But critical acclaim has never been Dylan’s intention. He has never given a damn about the critical or popular appeal of his work, and the musical world is immeasurably richer as a result.
Tom Ronan 