Bob Dylan - Tempest, Sept. 11, 2012

everyone talks as though writing sensitively about lyrics is so hard. it takes time and effort, and it helps to have training in scansion and prosody, but it's not really all that difficult. just most rock critics can't or won't expend the effort, governed as they are by quick judgements/challenging opinions® and looming deadlines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbkjw1mWsRE

Lex is a very good writer when he writes about what he knows or is interested in. I go by his recommendations for a lot of things, but not in relation to Bob Dylan.

Ha, amateurist, you are right about that article. Sentences like A sole ill-fated attempt to get into him – in my defence I was an easily misled 18-year-old, still briefly beholden to the Greatest Albums Ever lists churned out by the music press – ended two-and-a-half songs into a best-of compilation with me flinging the CD out of the window, outraged that anyone could have the temerity to sing like that and call it art, in which - almost marvellously - every significant word is an ugly cliche make me want to "fling something out of a window".

I think the central fault here is whoever commissioned him to do a purposely challops piece to wind up Grauniad readers.

i'd say the fault is shared between editor and author. but i take your point.

Anyone read the RS cover story? Does this interpretation jive with reality?

i think you mean jibe

Yes.

At the news stand yesterday the guy said he was sold out!

got tickets for his verizon center show in dc, never seen him before, figured i would regret it if he croaks soonish

i just got tix for the colorado show. what the heck! he better be playing some of the new stuff. weirdly, this last tour saw him breaking back into together through life after ignoring it aside from "forgetful heart" for the last two years or so.

the real controversy about this is "ellen allien, the legendary techno producer"...

is there anyone in the comments who's like "SHE DOESN'T EVEN PLAY HER OWN INSTRUMENTS COME ON"

i was pleasantly surprised to read in these comments the nicest guardian BTL post about me i've ever seen!

I bet Bob Dylan could make a better record with Tobias Freund xpost.

well this is quite a tempest!!

― goole, Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:55 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

got tickets for his verizon center show in dc, never seen him before, figured i would regret it if he croaks soonish

He's guaranteed to croak all the way through the show. Whether you'll regret it, it's hard to say.

On first pass at this album, seems good-not-great. Several nice tunes and good lines, and the degradation of his voice is made entirely worthwhile by crypt-opening gargle at the start of "Pay in Blood." And a good-not-great late-period Dylan album is still plenty to be happy about.

Love and Theft >> Modern Times >> Tempest >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Together Through Life (which I don't even own anymore)

xpost

Also interesting that his "late period" now is maybe his longest period, if you count it from Good as I Been to You forward. Tho arguably Good as I Been and World Gone Wrong are really their own interstitial phase. Even counting from Time Out of Mind, it's 15 years of sustained good-to-great work.

Alfred I'd go with that ranking except swapping the first two.

i'd say this is about the same as together through life, quality wise....though a far different record....this has some super highs and super lows, where together through life is pleasantly medium mostly

Time has proven Dylan TOOM correct: it wasn't part of any trilogy or tetrology.

*tetralogy

TOOM is part of the yet to be completed Lanois trilogy. the last installment is called "Lost At The Bottom of a Well"

Love & Theft > Christmas In The Heart > Tempest = Together Through Life > Modern Times (which I don't even own anymore)

I kinda hate Modern Times except for a song or two. Easily my least favorite Dylan vocal recording of the "late period".

o_O

Love & Theft = Time Out of Mind > Modern Times > Together Through Life > Tempest >>>>>>>> Christmas

i don't think dylan's voice is egregiously limited / ruined-sounding on any of the recent albums after love and theft. it's obviously not what it once was but he's figured out how to work with it. i don't listen to love and theft much but it always sounds to me like he's imprisoned in like a two or three note range.

I have no complaints about Dylan's voice on this record. "Pay in Blood" might be the best setting for it since L&T.

It's a good record, but not in the same universe as Love and Theft. The title track is like Lily Rosemary

aero, speaking as a guy who has been known to teach poetry, imo lex just means "all his lines have basically the same number of syllables and I can hear regular patterns"

now if he returns to this thread and gets all "I have a double first from Oxbridge and my paper on Milton's early versification was published in a special edition by the Scansion Society!" then I'll take it back.

but I'm betting I'm right.

why doesn't somebody start a poll to pick one song by Dylan lex would like? I nominate "Visions of Johanna"...

whoops, thead is dead )-:

I can't really think of a dylan song lex would like & also I think lex really doesn't want to even listen to dylan

got this today; engineered by Scott Litt!

OK I've listened to this once through now and I love the Titanic song and "Pay In Blood" makes me wish Dylan would record another gospel album.

I can't really think of a dylan song lex would like & also I think lex really doesn't want to even listen to dylan

i don't really

no one as far as i can tell has responded to my main criticisms re: being overly, tediously descriptive and cardboard characters

I think you personally like an awful lot of music with overly tediously descriptive and cardboard characters, albeit not much of it is held up by the lyrics as poetry crew. But this all sort of feeds into something that was in the Petridis review about the bar for 'great Dylan lyrics' having become ridiculously low over the years.

I don't think it's overly descriptive and the characters being cardboard, I guess they are viewed from a certain distance but I mean he's writing an old style folk disaster ballad, so it fits imo

But I mean you like the paris hilton album and all of a sudden you're picky about singing chops & evocative lyrics....like just admit you got a chance to troll in a major newspaper and get paid for it, that's awesome...but your rhetorical style wrt, to quote andrew sullivan I think is ”the closest weapon at hand”

I like the Titanic disaster song and am aware of it's lineage in the folk tradition of topical death songs but couldn't stop thinking of William McGonagall's poem 'The Tay Bridge Disaster' when listening to it.

calling anything "boring" is truly one of the worst and most useless criticisms there is.

you popping up in every thread to snipe at me in that underhanded, cunty way is defintiely one of the worst and most useless posting habits there is

it's nothing personal, i just happen to actually disagree with you on a huge number of things.

like the worth and use of everything i do? yeah that's not personal

i don't know what else you do besides write pieces like the above so i wouldn't say everything, no.

no one as far as i can tell has responded to my main criticisms re: being overly, tediously descriptive and cardboard characters

Contrary to your review, I don't think Dylan's lyrics work better on the page. I think they're written to be sung, and personally I think the way Dylan sings "The Tempest" is very effective. In this song his grizzled voice contributes to the overall effect. A youthful voice would not convey the same sense of world-weary acceptance - even jauntiness - about the prospect of impending doom. I'm not sure what you mean about it being "tediously descriptive". Perhaps you mean that there's not a lot of action. I think it's supposed to be a fairly static picture - one moment frozen in time - ie., the moment before the boat strikes the iceberg. So its supposed to be mainly descriptive. There's not much plot, and we all know the ending from the beginning. As far as cardboard characters, I don't think it's supposed to be a character study either. So what is it supposed to be? I guess it's part of the long lineage of disaster folk songs, from "Casey Jones" on down. Within Dylan's ouevre, it's also somewhat reminiscent of "Desolation Row", I think.

I am as excited to read lex's opinions on Dylan as he would be to read my opinions on Britney

xp a lineage that can trace itself back to a 1970 Grateful Dead song

I am as excited to read lex's opinions on Dylan as he would be to read my opinions on Britney

I'd love to read your opinions on Britney!

xp not sure if you're joking but there are a lot of other, older songs that are about casey jones.

^^^

my opinions on Britney are about as uninformed and prejudiced as lex's are about dylan so I'm not sure it would really be enjoyable for everybody plus I would actually have to devote some time to suffering through multiple albums of her material (as opposed to just being periodically irritated by her singles being played in public spaces) so uh no