Positively Bob Dylan

Music producer Izzy Goodman Young discovered an early unpublished song in his archives. The Talking Blues “Go Away You Bomb” is a rare example of an explicit protest song by Dylan against the atomic bomb. Stockholm’s newpaper “Dagens Nyheter” reprinted the lyrics (see links below).
In the meantime Bob Dylan has already confirmed the authenticity of the lyrics, however mentioning that he cannot really remember it. Young now owns all the rights to publish it in any way.

> “Go Away You Bomb” lyrics

Another decade, another triple-disc Dylan compilation. This one purports to be both a definitive retrospective and a reflection of fan choices logged online, but the imperative of representing all periods of Dylan’s career apparently outguns the punters’ preferences. Well, mine, anyway. The problem with retrospective compilations is that they are constantly being updated, with genuine gems shaved off the front end to accommodate more recent, comparatively unproven, work. But even allowing for that, who would really consider the likes of “Blood in My Eyes” and “You’re Gonna Quit Me” preferable to “Visions of Johanna” and “It’s Alright, Ma”? Only someone interested in giving a leg up to the less well-performing corners of Dylan’s catalogue, that’s who. Likewise, if you were going to feature just one 11-minute track, would you choose “Brownsville Girl” over “Desolation Row” or “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”? Ominously sharing its title with his worst album, this set contains an incomparable fund of classics – and is just as frustrating as previous Dylan compilations. (Reviewed by Andy Gill for “The Independent”)

Click here for album details

After an unbelievable 30 years Bob Dylan tops the US Billboard album charts again! His latest studio effort “Modern Times” sold more copies in the first week of its release than any other album in the United States. “We couldn’t be more thrilled that fans have responded to it so enthusiastically by putting Bob at No. 1, which is where he belongs” said Steve Barnett, chairman of Dylan’s Columbia Records label.

Internationally, “Modern Times” opened at No. 1 in many states including Australia, Canada, and several European countries.

It was way back in 1976 when “Desire” was his last album to top the Billboard Top 200, and only two other albums did the same - “Blood On The Tracks” (1975) and “Planet Waves” (1974).
Dylan’s new album is the third consecutive Top 10 studio album after “Time Out Of Mind” and “Love & Theft”, of which Rolling Stone magazine said that they “stand alongside the accomplishments of his wild youth.”

The first single from “Modern Times” is “When the Deal Goes Down”. The music video was directed by Bennett Miller (”Capote”) and features Scarlett Johansson. Dylan also appears in a new Apple commercial for iPod/iTunes to promote the release of his new album.

Bob Dylan, iPod & Billboard #1? Modern times couldn’t start any better than that.

> Modern Times
> View Apple’s new iPod + iTunes ad with Bob Dylan

Every once in a while we get to witness the birth of something very special: a new Bob Dylan album. Finally, after five long years of waiting, Dylan’s 31st studio album “Modern Times” is released in August 2006. For the first time Sony Music published a 5-minutes MP3 album sampler to download for free about a month prior to the release date.
“Modern Times” was recorded with his current touring band and produced by Jack Frost a.k.a. Bob Dylan himself, just like most of his recordings of the past 10 years.
When listening to the album for the first time, its crystal-clear bluesy sound will immediately remind you of “Love & Theft”. It could very well be thought of as disc 2 of a double album “Love, Theft & Modern Times”. The 10 new songs in 63 minutes are a brilliant, intelligent and nostalgic musical journey through Blues, Jazz and Gospel.

“Thunder On the Mountain” is a great opener, a piano rocker in the tradition of “Highway 61″ including a surprising line on R&B star Alicia Keys. “Spirit On the Water”, slows down the tempo to a jazzy piano bar blues love song: “I take good care of what belongs to me”. In “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” Dylan borrows from Muddy Waters, you might have heard a version on Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album, but Dylan extends the lyrics free-style: “Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains”. The beautiful ballad “When the Deal Goes Down” could very well be a track from “Time Out Of Mind”. “Someday baby, you won’t have to worry about me any more”, another great mid-tempo rocker leads to “Working Man’s Blues #2″ - one of the most beautiful songs Dylan has written recently. If it was performed on acoustic guitar, it would fit onto “Blood On the Tracks”: “I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall, sleep is like a temporary death.” Dylan as a songwriter is of course the Working Man.
“Beyond the Horizon at the end of the game every step that you take, I’m walking the same”, a spiritual confession for love waiting on the other side. A religious love song as a footnote to life. The next song, “Nettie Moore”, immediately brings back the mood of “Oh Mercy” with its musical quotes of “What Good am I?” and its dark lyrics: “The sun is stalled, I’m standing in the light, I wish to god that it was night.”
Following “Thunder” and “Someday”, “The Levee’s Gonna Break” is the third mid-tempo blues rock song on the album. It might have been inspired by the hurricane Katrina catastrophy, when among many others Dylan’s producer and friend Daniel Lanois lost his recording studio.
“Ain’t Talkin’” is a close-to-nine-minutes long epilogue filled with mystic pictures where the fire within the raconteur is still burning, still he’s not talking, “just walkin’”: “Some day you’ll be glad to have me around.” And guess what, We already are.

Bob Dylan’s new album again merges old and new music as a soundtrack for the lyrics of yet another late masterpiece. If you liked “Love & Theft”, “Time Out of Mind” and “Oh Mercy” go out and buy “Modern Times”. If you liked anything else by Bob Dylan, well then do the same. And if you don’t have any Dylan recordings in your collection (is that possible?), now it’s time to change that. Right now.

> album details