full circle
I've only listened to half of the new Dylan CD today - just what I could hear on the way to school & back. It's great, it's unbelievably affecting, and it's pretty in a way I haven't heard from Dylan since...ever.
There's a lot of talk in the reviews about how this makes up a trilogy with Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft, as if this is just a continuation of those other two records, but I'm hearing a lot that's totally new, a purity of tone and a gentility in the slow numbers, and an empathy in the writing that hasn't been much in play since Blood on the Tracks. I'm not hearing the Dylan of Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft as much as I'm hearing the writer of Chronicles - the recluse turned memoirist, liberating his past from cliches and finding a new way to write about his life so he can tolerate his memories. Maybe it reminds me more of his book because the songs are organized (so far) into chapters: the first two titles are complementary lines from the I Ching, the next three use Muddy Waters as their departure point, etc.
Love & Theft was all about packing everything he loves about our rural past - Charley Patton, dusty country lanes, moonlight dances, and pie - and rafting them down into the present on a Mississippi of words. In Modern Life he's tamed his logorrhea, and if the past is still his underlying obsession, it's not a lost mythical place anymore - the past is alive and vital in the present, just as surely as he is himself.
There's a lot of folkies out there who still resent Dylan for "stealing" old arrangements and passing them off as his own, pretending to be Woody Guthrie, or a symbolist poet, or a Christian, or Lightning Hopkins, or somebody, anybody else. There's something about him that doesn't feel authentic.
In Modern Times Dylan has finally become real.
There's a lot of talk in the reviews about how this makes up a trilogy with Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft, as if this is just a continuation of those other two records, but I'm hearing a lot that's totally new, a purity of tone and a gentility in the slow numbers, and an empathy in the writing that hasn't been much in play since Blood on the Tracks. I'm not hearing the Dylan of Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft as much as I'm hearing the writer of Chronicles - the recluse turned memoirist, liberating his past from cliches and finding a new way to write about his life so he can tolerate his memories. Maybe it reminds me more of his book because the songs are organized (so far) into chapters: the first two titles are complementary lines from the I Ching, the next three use Muddy Waters as their departure point, etc.
Love & Theft was all about packing everything he loves about our rural past - Charley Patton, dusty country lanes, moonlight dances, and pie - and rafting them down into the present on a Mississippi of words. In Modern Life he's tamed his logorrhea, and if the past is still his underlying obsession, it's not a lost mythical place anymore - the past is alive and vital in the present, just as surely as he is himself.
There's a lot of folkies out there who still resent Dylan for "stealing" old arrangements and passing them off as his own, pretending to be Woody Guthrie, or a symbolist poet, or a Christian, or Lightning Hopkins, or somebody, anybody else. There's something about him that doesn't feel authentic.
In Modern Times Dylan has finally become real.