Too Bad They Stopped At 20...

The U.K.'s great music magazine Mojo has a piece up on their website, listing their "20 Greatest Dylan Songs!?"

As a certified BobCat, I can't bicker with their picks...

Check 'em out here.

Muy Bueno.

Great stuff. Dylan, simmered with Willie Dixon and Chicken Skin Music-era Ry Cooder, served with a side of Los Lobos--compliments of David Hidalgo's accordion--and a heaping helping of Doug Sahm-style Tex-Mex hot sauce.

 

"Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice," Dylan snarls in "I Feel A Change Comin' On."

Bloody well right...

Video Link: "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

Click here.

Feel A Change Comin' On.

From the U.K.'s TimesOnLine, Bob Dylan on Barack Obama:

He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Dylan on Obama's book, Dreams From My Father: 

His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

Click here to read the interview in its entirety and listen to Feel A Change Comin' On from the upcoming Together Through Life. 

My Invitation Must've Gotten Lost In The Mail.

Ann Powers goes to all the cool parties.

Here she is in the L.A. Times, writing about Bob Dylan's new album:

I was lucky enough to attend a listening session Thursday night, where I sat on a comfy sofa in front of a good sound system and scribbled down some notes on the 10-song set. I got one listen. Here's a quick response.

"Beyond Here Lies Nothin' ": Hidalgo's accordion is Dylan's muse throughout this album. The instrument turns what would be Jimmy Reed-style blues into something more wide-ranging: a celebration of the Latin influence that also shaped early rock. There's something Leonard Cohen-esque about Dylan's lyric, which is deeply existential and exceedingly debonair.

"Life is Hard": Dylan apparently loved Dahan's Edith Piaf story "La Vie en Rose," and agreed to pen this song for the filmmaker's "My Own Love Song." It has a French feel, with a guitar line redolent of le jazz hot and sly references to a boulevard of broken dreams. Dylan's sad "Sea of Love," it represents him as a slightly cracked crooner.

"My Wife's Home Town": Enter the Devil Woman, a dangerous central character of the blues. The wifey is from down under, and I don't mean Australia. This one is pure Howlin' Wolf. Dylan's chuckle at the end might be the best part.

"If You Ever Go to Houston": It's not that this circular walking blues sounds like Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," but there's a similar feeling in that 1965 composition. Hidalgo's accordion shines sunlight on everything. The lyric has a Wild West feel, with oblique references to the history of the town in its name.

"Forgetful Heart": The album's most mystical cut could have fit on 1997's "Time Out of Mind," with a somewhat muted atmosphere and a last line that recalls Edgar Allan Poe -- "the door has closed forevermore / if there ever was a door." A banjo plaintively calls out from deep in the mix.

"Jolene": This bar-band romp imagines the "other woman" immortalized in Dolly Parton's 1973 hit as a street-strutting queen for whom any man would leave any wife. "You're something nice, I"m gonna grab my dice," chortles the satyr as a down-home double-guitar riff propels him forward.

"This Dream of You": Dylan does mariachi! The most obviously Latin-flavored track on an album that testifies to Mexican America's right to sing the blues. Is that a slack-key guitar in there, too?

"Shake, Shake Mama": This one does just what the title says. A loud, abrupt blues with a little bit of gospel in the lyric, it brings to mind one of Chicago's last men standing, Otis Rush.

"I Feel a Change Coming On": The title seems to nod at the Obama era, but this country-tinged song is at once more universal and more personal -- a meditation on sunsets, both real and imagined. Dylan sings in a honking baritone that celebrates the rips in his vocal cords. And there's harmonica.

"It's All Good": "Throw on the dust! Pile on the dust!" Dylan shouts in this apocalypse party of a song. Sharp guitar lines and one of the album's fastest tempos gives the band a chance to fade out on a high note. Dylan's final word: Enjoy this world, even as it descends into chaos. In fact, especially enjoy the chaos.

"Together Through Life" drops April 28.

UPDATE: I just heard the opening track--"Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"--and I'd down a shot of Herradura if I had some. Great drumming (love those toms!), snarly guitar, David Hidalgo's accordion, soulful organ, trumpet and that Father Time growl.  You can download it through the end of Monday here.

"Together Through Life": New Dylan Album Due April 28th.

Click here for Bob Dylan's comments on his upcoming new release.

Meanwhile, it smells a little gamey in Malibu...

From the Los Angeles Times:

How sweet is life when you live next to a celebrity in Malibu? Outside Bob Dylan’s house, the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

That’s what some of the singer-songwriter’s neighbors are claiming in an increasingly onerous dispute over a porta-potty at his sprawling ocean-view estate on Point Dume.

Residents contend that the nighttime sea breeze sends a noxious odor from a portable toilet on Dylan’s property wafting into their homes. The stench has made members of one family physically ill and forced them to abandon their bedrooms on warm nights, they claim.

For more than six months, Dylan has ignored their complaints and their pleas to remove the outhouse, the downwind neighbors say.

“It’s a scandal -- 'Mr. Civil Rights’ is killing our civil rights,” said David Emminger, whose home is directly behind the porta-potty -- apparently intended for use by employees of the entertainer best known for his 1960s-era protest songs.

Emminger and his wife have installed five industrial-size fans in their front yard in an attempt to blow the odor back at Dylan. But they say the fans are no match for the ocean breeze that sweeps across the singer’s land.

Dylan, who has lived on a multi-lot compound next to Bluewater Road for more than two decades (editor's note: actually three decades), did not respond to inquiries about the toilet. Neither did his New York-based attorney.

Guards in a security shack that is staffed around the clock near the edge of Dylan’s compound are among those who use the porta-potty, according to neighbors.

The guard house has been the source of controversy in the past. In 1989, when Dylan sought a permit to build it, Los Angeles County building and safety inspectors discovered it was not accessible by the handicapped. According to county records, the singer bypassed accessibility requirements by promising, in writing, that he “would not hire any handicapped persons” to work in it.

No word on whether the property's pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles.

New Dylan Album Due.

     Good news for BobCats everywhere... 

     From David Fricke in Rolling Stone:

     I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I'm reading James Joyce/Some people tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice," Bob Dylan sings in a leathery growl, capturing the essence of his forthcoming studio album — raw-country love songs, sly wordplay and the wounded state of the nation — in "I Feel a Change Coming On," one of the record's 10 new originals.

     Set for late April, the as-yet-untitled album arrives a few months after Dylan's outtakes collection Tell Tale Signs, and it "came as a surprise," says a source close to Dylan's camp. Last year, filmmaker Olivier Dahan, who directed the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie en Rose, approached Dylan about writing a song for his next feature. Dylan responded with "Life Is Hard," a bleak ballad with mandolin, pedal steel and him singing in a dark, clear voice, "The evening winds are still/I've lost the way and will." (The song appears in the film My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellweger.)

     Inspired, Dylan kept writing and recording songs with his road band and guests, with Los Lobos' David Hidalgo rumored on accordion. Dylan produced the album under his usual pseudonym, Jack Frost.

     The disc has the live-in-the-studio feel of Dylan's last two studio records, 2001's Love and Theft and 2006's Modern Times, but with a seductive border-cafe feel (courtesy of the accordion on every track) and an emphasis on struggling-love songs. The effect — in the opening shuffle, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," the Texas-dancehall jump of "If You Ever Go to Houston" and the waltz "This Dream of You" — is a gnarly turn on early-1970s records like New Morning and Planet Waves.

     Dylan makes references to the national chaos, as on the viciously funny slow blues "My Wife's Home Town" ("State gone broke, the county's dry/Don't be lookin' at me with that evil eye"), culminating in the deceptive rolling rock of "It's All Good." Against East L.A. accordion and a snake's nest of guitars, Dylan tells you how bad things are — "Brick by brick, they tear you down/A teacup of water is enough to drown" — then ices each verse with the title line, a pithy shot of sneering irony and calming promise. "You would never expect the record after Modern Times to sound like this," the source says. "Bob takes all of those disparate elements you hear and puts them into a track. But you can't put your finger on it — 'It sounds exactly like that.' That's why he's so original."

     I'm a BobCat, and I love accordion. A Dylan album with David Hidalgo guesting conjures up dusty, dry-as-a-bone border towns filled with hard luck and soft hearts. Dylan has worked with both accordionist Flaco Jiménez and the late, great Doug Sahm and I'd imagine those names came up at some point during the making of this new one. Given what Fricke writes here, how could they not?

     Late April. I'll keep you posted. 

New Dylan Album Imminent?

These guys think so.

From Uncut:

Bob Dylan looks set to release an album of entirely new material in late April. Ten new tracks are expected for the record, which was reportedly recorded in California in October of last year.

The songs have been mixed and sequenced and playbacks are believed to have recently taken place in Sony’s European offices. An Autumn release date was originally suggested but it is understood this was brought forward to coincide with the final stages of Dylan’s upcoming European tour.

According to Dylan fansite Isis, Dylan was approached to write the soundtrack to forthcoming film ‘My Own Love’ song, starring Renee Zellweger and Forest Whitaker. Supposedly, when Dylan went into the studio he was so impressed with the results he decided to record his own album of new material. It is also believed that not all the musicians on the new release are from Dylan’s current touring band.