PODCAST: BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Two: 2)Shadow Kingdom: Steppin' Out into Space

DYLAN- SHADOW KINGDOM.

The show is not, as many of us hoped, an opportunity for Dylan to give us live versions of songs from ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS. Yet in many ways the sound of the music is not too far away from that epochal album. It is subtitled ‘Early Songs of Bob Dylan’. Of the thirteen selections, only one (What Was it You Wanted) is from the 80s. The rest are from the ‘60s or early ‘70s. The most surprising element is undoubtedly the presence of a completely new band of backing musicians – with no drummer. Each song has been rearranged to suit Dylan’s new vocal approach, which combines the lessons he has learned from the crooners with many elements of his own styles from the past. There is certainly no way that he can be accused of ‘croaking’ his way through the songs. The gravelly tones of the Together through Life and Tempest have vanished. Another surprising facet of the show is that for the first time in nearly twenty years Dylan never touches a keyboard, sometimes playing acoustic guitar but otherwise concentrating on his singing, standing firmly at the side of the stage with his hands by his side, sometimes gesticulating to illustrate his lyrics.

Dylan – Shadow Kingdom

Dylan’s audiences are used to seeing him recreate his songs on stage. But in Shadow Kingdom every single song is given an extensive makeover. The opener When I Paint My Masterpiece retains the lyrics about hiding away to compose which Dylan featured on his 2018 and 2019 tours but sounds more reflective here. The musicians play in a restrained way which allows Dylan’s vocals to take centre stage. Every word is carefully pronounced, with many subtle vocal nuances. Sometimes he sings, sometimes he speaks…. Always he acts out the songs with great subtlety. The whole show demonstrates to the world that he has moved into yet another phase of his career; one in which his renewed vocal power is placed (often quite literally) centre stage. His interest in reinterpreting his old songs is undimmed. When he performs a newly accordion-led Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine he stands at the side of the stage without an instrument, pointing at the audience from time to time, so that the song becomes part of a conversation with the audience. Here, as in almost every performance in the show, Dylan enunciates with beautifully weighted light irony.

The reinterpretations of three songs from Highway 61 Revisited are perhaps the most radical in terms of Dylan’s approach. Queen Jane Approximately is delivered slowly and soulfully, in a way that emphasises the song’s winning melody, with Dylan sighing from the distance of many years about the vicissitudes of the youthful title character – who may be a ‘misled’ young girl, the conceptual artist Andy Warhol or Dylan himself. Or quite possibly a combination of all three. Tombstone Blues, normally a fully ‘rocking’ number consisting of a surreal trip through American past and future history, is treated as an almost spoken recitation. Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues is given a similarly languid treatment as Dylan recounts this convoluted tale of drugs and women (which are possibly, in this case, interchangeable) in a mythic version of Mexico, with a world weary grace.