The announcement sometime in the fall that Bob Dylan would be recording and releasing an album of standards recorded by Frank Sinatra — Shadows in the Night — was met by many with incredulity. Dylan, the craggy-voiced former folkie, had no business dabbling in the Great American Songbook, some said.
Others, like me, were intrigued. Dylan, after all, has spent more than 50 years deeply immersed in the American musical traditions, creating his own, to be sure, but also the traditions of others. He has covered folk, blues and country classics, forgotten masterpieces and the random ephemera that makes up the conversation that is our musical legacy.
That’s why the question for me was never, “what was Dylan thinking?” but “what took him so long?”
Dylan says as much in his interview with Robert Love in AARP The Magazine, when asked if his long-time fans should be surprised:
Well, they shouldn’t be surprised. There’s a lot of types of songs I’ve sung over the years, and they definitely have heard me sing standards before.
So, Shadows in the Night dropped today and, for my money, it is an album that fits neatly within Dylan’s late-career narrative, one that has focused on using, deconstructing and reconstructing American music history, making it his own and injecting a bit of the past into a present zeitgeist that has little patience for anything not of the moment. It is not, as might have been expected, an album steeped in irony or one recorded with a wink and Dylan’s tongue firmly in cheek.
The recordings are faithful, rather than pastiches of styles or older lyrics — and Dylan’s nearly spent voice is in surprisingly good form, its flaws (the limited range, the cracks) lending a warmth and sense of a weariness indicative of experience to songs (and a singer) that have lived a long, long time. Reviewing individual songs is unnecessary here — Shadows in the Night is best digested whole, its 10 songs working together, like a suite, its tempo consistent if muted and ruminative.
People interested in the long conversation that is American musical history should appreciate this album. People interested in the kind of recreation of the American Songbook recorded by Michael Buble or Rod Stewart (Rod’s voice may be up to the task, but his recordings made me wonder just how connected he was to the project or whether he actually understood the words he was singing) probably won’t.
As for skeptical Dylan fans, I say this: Relax, sit back and let Bobby take the wheel. I think you’ll be happy you did.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 