New Bob Dylan album (Modern Times, August 29)

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 6:10 pm

Bob Dylan gets to work on new album
First LP in five years on the way

Bob Dylan is recording his first album of new songs in five years.

According to reports, he spent four days last week rehearsing the material with an unspecified band, prior to entering a studio this week.

The album is planned as the long-awaited follow-up to 2001's 'Love & Theft', and follows the success of the soundtrack to Martin Scorcese's 2005 biopic, 'No Direction Home'.

Dylan and five unnamed musicians rehearsed the new material from Tuesday to Friday (January 31-February 3) last week behind closed doors at the Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, reports the local paper The Poughkeepsie Journal.

"It was experimental, all kinds of different licks," according to the venue's executive director Chris Silva, who watched the sessions. "They would get into one thing and they would go over it and over it, then they would change gears."

Silva added that Dylan rehearsed for four to five hours each day without a break, and indicated that recording sessions would start in a Manhattan studio this week.

Since the release of 'Love & Theft', the only new Dylan recordings to appear have been on film soundtracks, The most recent, 'Tell Ol' Bill', was released on the OST to the Nick Caro-directed film 'North Country'.

Ali · Post by **Ali** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 6:47 pm

Excellent news Shane!

Ali

(sorry Partisan

- I like the Hippy)

lizzytysh · Post by **lizzytysh** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 7:38 pm

Tee-hee, Ali... yes, me too [but, then, what else is new

?].

I'm glad to see this, as well.

< * Is that Kush I hear bursting through the door ? * >

~ Lizzy

tomsakic · Post by **tomsakic** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 11:56 am

According to the release list from Croatian Sony (sourced from Sony Europe), release dates in 2006 includes:

Bob Dylan: [not titled], August 2006
Leonard Cohen: [not titled], September 2006

This is obviously only the optimistic opinion of SonyBMG. It's enough to LC or Dylan just to mention they started to record, and Sony immediatelly announce the wild guesses of dates. - Dylan only last week announced he started to record the songs, and Leonard as we know started last Fall. But these days we had many confirmations from his Toronto interviews the album will be ready until the end of this year.

Dylan, on the other hand, is much quicker. I presume he will record songs at once, in few weeks.

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 1:40 pm

I expect Dylan's album to come out by the end of the year. August sounds too good to be true.

tomsakic · Post by **tomsakic** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:21 pm

I agree. I expect Dylan before the end of the year, and Cohen also, in worst case in January-February. But my wild guess is November for both of them. They're avoiding Christmas season, when their album would sunk under tones of mainstream hit makers which publish their records in Summer or for Christmas. Lately, Cohen's dates are always February, or Fall (or his birthday:-), something in between, when the best quality and independent music comes out.

tomsakic · Post by **tomsakic** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 5:24 pm

Dylan *will be* quicker:-)

He's a notoriously slow writer. As he told the audience at the Hall of Fame ceremony: "If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often." As it is, Cohen often spends up to four years, on and off, working on a single song (Hallelujah being a classic example) before he deems it satisfactory. The new CD is only about one-quarter complete, so it could be 2007 or even 2008, he acknowledges, before the follow-up to 2004's Dear Heather sees daylight.

The Globe and Mail

jerry · Post by **jerry** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 6:22 am

Dylan almost always puts out either new or old music in the Fall.Usually November.

liverpoolken · Post by **liverpoolken** » Thu Feb 16, 2006 6:29 pm

Bob's last album 'Love and Theft' was officially released on September 11 2001.

A date that perhaps has gone down in history for other reasons.

Ta Ken

lizzytysh · Post by **lizzytysh** » Thu Feb 16, 2006 6:30 pm

The title isn't altogether inappropriate for that date, either.

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 7:09 pm

Bob Dylan names new album

And it's out in August

Bob Dylan's first album of new songs in five years will be called 'Modern Times' and released on August 28, according to an inside source at his US record company, Sony-BMG.

A number of hand-picked journalists were given a playback of the album in New York City last week but were required to sign legal undertakings not to talk about what they heard. One record company source described the album as similar in style to 2001's 'Love & Theft'. Another source claimed the dozen songs include "at least three masterpieces".

Tracks planned for the new record include 'Thunder On The Mountain', 'Spirit On The Water', 'Workingman's Blues' and 'When The Deal Goes Down'.

It appears unlikely that any of the new material will feature in the set-list for his imminent UK and European dates. None of the songs from 'Modern Times' were premiered on Dylan's recent US tour, which wound-up in Florida last month.

He plays Cardiff International Arena on June 27 and Bournemouth International Centre on May 28.

http://www.nme.com/news/bob-dylan/23307

Dem · Post by **Dem** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 10:25 pm

One record company source described the album as similar in style to 2001's 'Love & Theft'.

If it is similar to "Love & Theft" then it will be a nice album.

Dem

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 4:21 pm

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/st ... 89,00.html

Dylan searches for a new soul mate

The enigmatic singer is back on form and keeping his fans guessing with a walk-on role for diva Alicia Keys on his new album

Caspar Llewellyn Smith
Sunday July 2, 2006
The Observer

It has been five years since the release of Bob Dylan's last album, but any notion that the 65-year-old singer might have lost touch with the contemporary world is dispelled by the first verse of 'Modern Times', the opening song on his new record.

'Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon, There's a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon,' it begins, before quickly skipping to the lines 'I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't help from crying/When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee.'

It is not known whether Dylan really is a fan of the soul singer 39 years his junior - ever the enigma, he has not discussed the new record yet. But the two of them are thought to have met at the 2001 Grammy awards, when Keys was a five-times winner with her album Songs in A Minor and Dylan won Best Contemporary Folk Album with Love and Theft. Dylan also seems to have done his research - Keys was indeed raised in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York.

'I first heard through the grapevine that he'd mentioned my name in one of his new songs,' Keys told The Observer, the first newspaper to hear Dylan's album, last night.

'I just knew somebody had to be playin' with me! How could such a legend know me? And bigger than that, want to write about me? I haven't heard the song yet - it's top secret. But I'm crazy excited about it and I'm honored to be on his mind.'

This is not the first time Dylan has introduced real characters into his songs - 1963's 'I Shall Be Free' featured Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren - and ever since the early Sixties his lyrics have been subjected to close scrutiny.

Debates about the autobiographical and political nature of his work will be revived with the appearance of this 32nd studio album. His last, Love and Theft, was released on 11 September, 2001, and the reference on the title track of the new record to 'all the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town' might lead some to speculate that Dylan has been brooding on the events of that fateful day. Similarly, while the title of the song 'Workingman's Blues' pays an obvious debt to Merle Haggard, with whom Dylan recently toured, and his record of that name, it's the line 'I got a brand new suit and brand new wife' that will have the gossips' tongues wagging in the light of Dylan's uncertain matrimonial status. But, inevitably, the songs elude strict interpretation, and instead the listener is left to contemplate the grander themes of nature and mortality.

The new album may be Dylan's first for half a decade, but in the interim he has starred in the film Masked and Anonymous, written the best-selling Chronicles, appeared in the Martin Scorsese documentaries devoted to his early career and is currently hosting his own show on XM satellite radio in America. Then there is his relentless touring schedule, which this week brought him to Britain for two shows in Cardiff and Bournemouth.

None of the 10 new songs from Modern Times has been played live yet, but the expectation is that this will change after the record's release on 28 August. Dylan rehearsed at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, in late January and early February, before recording the album in a Manhattan studio.

Steve Barnett, chairman of Columbia Records, said that the company was 'approaching Modern Times as the third release in an outstanding trilogy of recorded works along with Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft'. The new album certainly has a similarly rootsy sound to its predecessors. Among the 10 tracks are at least three pieces that many will see as masterpieces: 'Working Man's Blues', 'Netty Moore' and 'Ain't Talkin', Just Walkin'.'

· Caspar Llewellyn Smith is the editor of Observer Music Monthly.

Odd couples

Musicians love paying tribute to fellow singers. Among the best-known examples are Van Morrison's 1972 'Jackie Wilson Said' in praise of the soul singer and the Commodores' tribute to Wilson and Marvin Gaye, 'Nightshift'. Not every namecheck is positive. Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' includes the couplet: 'Elvis was a hero to most/but he never meant shit to me.' And Lynyrd Skynyrd used 'Sweet Home Alabama' to rebuke Neil Young. Those who prefer their tributes wry should turn to Leonard Cohen's 'Tower of Song' which notes: 'I said to Hank Williams how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn't answered yet.' Kurt Cobain gave Cohen a similarly wistful send-off singing: 'Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/so I can sigh eternally' in Nirvana's 'Pennyroyal Tea'. Dylan has been namechecked in song by everyone from David Bowie to Belle and Sebastian.

linda_lakeside · Post by **linda_lakeside** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 4:36 pm

He's a notoriously slow writer. As he told the audience at the Hall of Fame ceremony: "If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often."

Great quote. And apparently I'm a slow listener (yes, I can hear the snickers in the back rows), as I'm still with Time out of Mind. Love & Theft hasn't found its way into my house yet. To be honest, this is the first time I've hear of it. Yep. I better go.

Linda.

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 4:39 pm

linda_lakeside wrote:[Love & Theft hasn't found its way into my house yet. To be honest, this is the first time I've hear of it. Yep. I better go.

I strongly suggest it does find it's way to you soon, for it is a masterpiece as only Dylan makes them.