SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: BOB DYLAN – SHADOW KINGDOM

Bob Dylan
Shadow Kingdom
Columbia Records

It would be difficult to claim that any of the songs included on Bob Dylan’s latest album Shadow Kingdom weren’t some of the best of his early catalogue. With selections culled mainly from his first two decades of notoriety, ranging from from albums like Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited all the way to Nashville Skyline and Planet Waves, listeners to Shadow Kingdom will have much to look forward to despite some unevenness overall.

So, how to review an album of songs that are bona-fide Bob Dylan classics, yet involve so much more accordion and harmonica and single-string guitar strumming than the original versions? One way is to consider whether or not these new versions emphasize anything different than the originals…whether or not Bob Dylan’s changed voice and more advanced age imbue them with any potentially new meaning. Is “Forever Young” more interesting stripped down and sung by a man who is now 82-years-old? The answer there is yes, yes, it is. But can “Tombstone Blues,” in which large portions of the song are only his voice with some very lightly strummed guitar in the back, hold up with the same deepened sense of meaning? I’m less convinced in this case, despite the eternally intriguing lyrics.

One thing that happens when these songs are propped up by gentle accordion and harmonica and soft curly-cue guitars is that the lyrics seem to take up more space. That almost always works to Dylan’s advantage because he’s such a clever writer, but in a song like “Tombstone Blues” the brisk pace of the original, lost here, turns out to have been part of its success and surrealism, and with the silliness of the lyrics more pronounced, in such a spare rendition it has the unexpected effect of detraction. In many other cases, however, the album is a success in stitching together (for there are no gaps of silence between tracks) a variety of early career songs and giving them the late-career treatment. First single “Watching the River Flow” isn’t necessarily “better” than earlier versions, but when this version of Bob Dylan croons, in his gravelly, aged voice,

“I’m still in this all-night café /
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon /
… to sit down on this bank of sand /
And watch the river flow,”

it hits a little different, less about a wandering, restless young person seeking their way and more about a nostalgic older person finally taking a rest, unsure how to contribute anything more. With the lyrics rising to the surface of these songs, there are many moments like that throughout the album where certain lines seem to take on new interpretations.

Overall, the whole album seems designed to make each song more wistful and melancholic and spare, which has the effect for any long-time listener of putting his age (and our own, perhaps, aging alongside him) in conflict with earlier versions of the songs and ourselves and ultimately Dylan himself. These are older tracks, supremely chosen, and leanly reimagined, an experiment in revision and reinterpretation that reveals the shadowy interiors lurking within each song that have always been there.

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