Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 50:58
Size: 116.7 MB
Styles: Album rock, AM Pop
Year: 1965/2014
Art: Front

[ 6:07] 1. Like A Rolling Stone
[ 4:04] 2. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
[ 5:55] 3. Tombstone Blues
[ 3:15] 4. From A Buick 6
[ 5:56] 5. Ballad Of A Thin Man
[ 5:26] 6. Queen Jane Approximately
[ 3:26] 7. Highway 61 Revisited
[ 5:27] 8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
[11:19] 9. Desolation Row

Taking the first, electric side of Bringing It All Back Home to its logical conclusion, Bob Dylan hired a full rock & roll band, featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield, for Highway 61 Revisited. Opening with the epic "Like a Rolling Stone," Highway 61 Revisited careens through nine songs that range from reflective folk-rock ("Desolation Row") and blues ("It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry") to flat-out garage rock ("Tombstone Blues," "From a Buick 6," "Highway 61 Revisited"). Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster. Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock. And that is the most revolutionary thing about Highway 61 Revisited -- it proved that rock & roll needn't be collegiate and tame in order to be literate, poetic, and complex. ~Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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Bob Dylan - Fallen Angels

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 37:16
Size: 85.3 MB
Styles: Standards, Pop/Rock
Year: 2016
Art: Front

[2:54] 1. Young At Heart
[2:50] 2. Maybe You'll Be There
[3:31] 3. Polka Dots And Moonbeams
[3:59] 4. All The Way
[2:53] 5. Skylark
[3:24] 6. Nevertheless
[3:01] 7. All Or Nothing At All
[2:13] 8. On A Little Street In Singapore
[3:58] 9. It Had To Be You
[2:50] 10. Melancholy Mood
[3:02] 11. That Old Black Magic
[2:36] 12. Come Rain Or Come Shine

You can go all the way back to the beginning of “What the fuck is Bob Dylan doing now?” and find jazz. “Peggy Day” from Nashville Skyline—his first detour into melodic crooning—is snappy Western swing; following that was Self Portrait’s notorious take on Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” and New Morning’s hepcat pastiche, “If Dogs Run Free.” Dylan’s earliest Frank Sinatra tribute dates back five decades and only found its first official release in 2014: the addled Basement Tapes-era riff on the Johnny Mercer classic “One for My Baby (One More for the Road).”

None of this, however, made the advent of his Standards Period last year any less of a surprise. Some of the initial shock was the result of the growing stigma around the aging-rocker-does-the-American-songbook format, not the fact that Dylan would offer his own version. As he himself acknowledged in his labyrinthine Musicares acceptance speech last year, this sort of record has become a convention—a profitable one. At this point, any new release in this vein scans as something more sordid than a stocking-stuffer: an empty money grab.

Dylan’s particular, oddball point in bringing up the trend was to illustrate the absurd degree to which he was still viewed as a man apart. Why did people pore over Shadows in the Night any more than Rod Stewart’s latest compilation? “In their reviews no one says anything,” Dylan demurred. “In my reviews, they’ve got to look under every stone and report about it.” ~Winston Cook-Wilson

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Traveling Wilburys - 2 albums: The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 / The Traveling Wilburys Vol 3

Reversing the usual process by which groups break up and give way to solo careers, the Traveling Wilburys are a group made up of solo stars. The group was organized by former Beatle George Harrison, former Electric Light Orchestra leader Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison, thus representing three generations of rock stars. In 1988, the five (who had known each other for years) came together to record a Harrison B-side single and ended up writing and recording an album on which they shared lead vocals. It turned out to be a way to transcend the high expectations made of any of them as individuals, and a delighted public sent the album to number three, with two singles, "Handle With Care" and "End of the Line" hitting the charts. Unfortunately, Orbison died of a heart attack only a few weeks after the album's release.

Two years later, the remaining quartet released a second album, inexplicably titled Vol. 3. Although it didn't match the success of the first Wilburys album, it was another million-selling hit. Throughout the '90s, there were rumors of another Traveling Wilburys record in the works, but no new albums from the group surfaced. Harrison and Lynne did re-team in 1995, when Lynne produced and reworked two John Lennon demos with the Beatles for their Anthology rarities collection.

The Traveling Wilburys albums drifted out of print in the late '90s, making the 2007 release of The Traveling Wilburys Collection -- a double-disc set containing both albums, plus a bonus DVD -- a noteworthy affair. It debuted at number one in the U.K. and nine in the U.S., eventually earning platinum and gold certifications in the respective countries. In 2016, the collection saw a re-release on Concord. ~William Ruhlmann

Album: The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 36:14
Size: 82.9 MB
Styles: Roots, Rock
Year: 1988
Art: Front

[3:18] 1. Handle With Care
[3:28] 2. Dirty World
[2:58] 3. Rattled
[3:50] 4. Last Night
[3:23] 5. Not Alone Anymore
[3:30] 6. Congratulations
[3:35] 7. Heading For The Light
[3:16] 8. Margarita
[5:27] 9. Tweeter And The Monkey Man
[3:26] 10. End Of The Line

The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1

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Album: The Traveling Wilburys Vol 3
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 36:02
Size: 82.5 MB
Styles: Roots, Rock
Year: 1990
Art: Front

[3:13] 1. She's My Baby
[3:34] 2. Inside Out
[3:12] 3. If You Belonged To Me
[3:18] 4. The Devil's Been Busy
[3:18] 5. T7 Deadly Sins
[3:14] 6. Poor House
[3:04] 7. Where Were You Last Night
[3:33] 8. Cool Dry Place
[3:16] 9. New Blue Moon
[3:19] 10. You Took My Breath Away
[2:55] 11. Wilbury Twist

The Traveling Wilburys Vol 3

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Bob Dylan - Triplicate (sampler)

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 33:08
Size: 75.9 MB
Styles: Traditional pop
Year: 2017
Art: Front

[2:52] 1. The Best Is Yet to Come
[4:05] 2. These Foolish Things
[2:34] 3. It's Funny to Everyone but Me
[3:41] 4. When the World Was Young
[3:35] 5. I Could Have Told You
[3:12] 6. Sentimental Journey
[3:33] 7. That Old Feeling
[3:23] 8. My One and Only Love
[2:35] 9. Stardust
[3:33] 10. Once Upon a Time

It's possible to read the title of Triplicate in two ways. First, the 2017 collection is the third installment in Bob Dylan's exploration of the Great American Songbook, following quickly on the heels of 2015's Shadows in the Night and 2016's Fallen Angels. Secondly, Triplicate is indeed a triple-album, or perhaps more accurately, a set of three interlinked albums all running 32 minutes apiece. Each of the three discs are given titles -- the first is dubbed 'Til the Sun Goes Down, the second Devil Dolls, with Comin' Home Late rounding out the collection -- and they're presented in a manner not dissimilar to an old-fashioned album of 78 rpms, a nod to the dawn of popular recorded music. By now, Dylan's approach to this material is familiar -- he takes his touring band into the legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood to record arrangements that feel lean yet full, rooted in pre-war pop but played for a barroom audience -- but it is by no means exhausted. Dylan is captivated by this music, reveling in the lyrics, restoring intros often left off of modern interpretations, bending his style to fit the songs instead of vice-versa. Like Fallen Angels before it, Triplicate is palpably lighter than the weary Shadows in the Night, and that's not just because there are livelier tempos here ("Day In, Day Out" positively glides along on its swift speed and horns). Much of this breeziness derives from Dylan's performance. Cherishing the turns of phrase as much as the intent of the song, he sings with a sly sensitivity that's alluring; when he elongates a phrase or has his voice crack, he reveals more about the song than any retro-swinger with showboating chops. This comparison stands on Triplicate more than its predecessors because it's filled with songs that often appear on modern collections of standards: "Stormy Weather," "As Time Goes By," "The Best Is Yet to Come," "Day In, Day Out," "Sentimental Journey," These Foolish Things," and "Stardust." Dylan treats these common classics with as much care as he does "There's a Flaw in My Flue," a Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke obscurity that appeared on Frank Sinatra's 1957 Close to You. Its appearance suggests how Triplicate, along with its cousins, is an ongoing exploration of Sinatra's body of work, but if Dylan learned anything from Sinatra, it's how to drill to the core of the song. Dylan does just that on Triplicate, finding the heart beating within some old warhorses and placing them within several great American musical traditions, and that's why this cements his place as one of the most distinctive interpreters of the Great American Songbook. ~Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Triplicate (sampler)

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Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 46:53
Size: 107.3 MB
Styles: Folk rock
Year: 1965/2013
Art: Front

[2:20] 1. Subterranean Homesick Blues
[2:46] 2. She Belongs To Me
[3:54] 3. Maggie's Farm
[2:50] 4. Love Minus Zero
[3:04] 5. Outlaw Blues
[2:34] 6. On The Road Again
[6:29] 7. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream
[5:30] 8. Mr. Tambourine Man
[5:39] 9. Gates Of Eden
[4:12] 10. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
[7:29] 11. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

With Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan had begun pushing past folk, and with Bringing It All Back Home, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it's not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Maggie's Farm," and "Outlaw Blues"; it's that he's exploding with imagination throughout the record. After all, the music on its second side -- the nominal folk songs -- derive from the same vantage point as the rockers, leaving traditional folk concerns behind and delving deep into the personal. And this isn't just introspection, either, since the surreal paranoia on "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the whimsical poetry of "Mr. Tambourine Man" are individual, yet not personal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really, as he writes uncommonly beautiful love songs ("She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit") that sit alongside uncommonly funny fantasias ("On the Road Again," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"). This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album. ~Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Bringing It All Back Home

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Bob Dylan - Slow Train Coming

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 46:27
Size: 106.3 MB
Styles: Album rock, Contemporary rock
Year: 1976/2005
Art: Front

[5:22] 1. Gotta Serve Somebody
[6:28] 2. Precious Angel
[5:06] 3. I Believe In You
[5:55] 4. Slow Train
[5:25] 5. Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking
[3:51] 6. Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
[5:26] 7. When You Gonna Wake Up
[4:23] 8. Man Gave Names To All The Animals
[4:27] 9. When He Returns

Keyboards -- Barry Beckett; Drums -- Pick Withers; Bass -- Tim Drummond; Guitars -- Mark Knopfler, Bob Dylan.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Bob Dylan would change direction at the end of the '70s, since he had dabbled in everything from full-on repudiation of his legacy to a quiet embrace of it, to dipping his toe into pure showmanship. Nobody really could have expected that he would turn to Christianity on Slow Train Coming, embracing a born-again philosophy with enthusiasm. He has no problem in believing in a vengeful god -- you gotta serve somebody, after all -- and this is pure brimstone and fire throughout the record, even on such lovely testimonials as "I Believe in You." The unexpected side effect of his conversion is that it gave Dylan a focus he hadn't had since Blood on the Tracks, and his concentration carries over to the music, which is lean and direct in a way that he hadn't been since, well, Blood on the Tracks. Focus isn't necessarily the same thing as consistency, and this does suffer from being a bit too dogmatic, not just in its religion, but in its musical approach. Still, it's hard to deny Dylan's revitalized sound here, and the result is a modest success that at least works on its own terms. ~Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Slow Train Coming

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Bob Dylan - Shadows in the Night

Styles: Vocal, Folk
Year: 2015
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 35:22
Size: 81,6 MB
Art: Front

(4:51)  1. I'm A Fool To Want You
(3:24)  2. The Night We Called It A Day
(2:56)  3. Stay With Me
(3:01)  4. Autumn Leaves
(3:38)  5. Why Try To Change Me Now
(3:28)  6. Some Enchanted Evening
(3:26)  7. Full Moon And Empty Arms
(3:37)  8. Where Are You?
(3:20)  9. What'll I Do
(3:36) 10. That Lucky Old Sun

As an encore at almost every show on his North American tour last fall, Bob Dylan performed an unlikely ballad: "Stay With Me," recorded by Frank Sinatra on a 1964 single and written for a 1963 film, The Cardinal, about a young priest who ascends to a post in the Vatican. Sinatra cut the song, a prayer for guidance, as if from on high, in orchestration as grand as papal robes. On this quietly provocative and compelling album, Dylan enters the words and melody as he did onstage like a supplicant, in a tiptoe baritone through streaks of pedal steel guitar that suggest the chapel-like quiet of a last-chance saloon. But Dylan's need is immediate, even carnal, and he pleads his case with a survivor's force, in a deep, shockingly clear voice that sounds like rebirth in itself. In stripping the song to pure, robust confession, Dylan turns "Stay With Me" into the most fundamental of Great American Songs: a blues. 

Dylan transforms everything on Shadows in the Night 10 slow-dance covers, mostly romantic standards from the pre-rock era of American popular songwriting into a barely-there noir of bowed bass and throaty shivers of electric guitar. There are occasional dusky flourishes of brass (the moaning curtain of horns in "The Night We Called It a Day"), but the most prominent voice, other than Dylan's, is his steel guitarist Donny Herron's plaintive cries of Hawaiian and West Texas sorrow. Sinatra is a connecting presence: He recorded all of these songs, and Dylan made Shadows at the Capitol Records studio in Los Angeles where Sinatra did his immortal work for that label. Sinatra even co-wrote the first song, "I'm a Fool to Want You," in 1951. When Dylan crawls uphill through the line "To share a kiss that the devil has known," it is easy to hear Sinatra's then-tumultuous romance with Ava Gardner along with echoes of the wounded desire Dylan left all over Blood on the Tracks.

Yet Shadows in the Night is less a tribute to Sinatra than a belated successor to Dylan's 1992 and '93 LPs of solo folk and blues covers, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong: a spare, restorative turn to voices that have, in some way, always been present in his own. "Autumn Leaves" and Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do" are the kind of ladies' choices Dylan surely played with his Fifties bands at school dances. "That Lucky Old Sun" (Number One for Frankie Laine in 1949) turned up in Dylan's early-Nineties set lists, but that's no surprise: Its near-suicidal resignation is not far from that of Blind Willie McTell's "Broke Down Engine," on World Gone Wrong, or Dylan's own "Love Sick," on 1997's Time Out of Mind. The great shock here, then, is Dylan's singing. Dylan's focus and his diction, after years of drowning in sandpaper, evoke his late-Sixties poise and clarity on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline also records of deceptive restraint and retrospect  with an eccentric rhythmic patience in the way he holds words and notes across the faint suggestions of tempo. It is not crooning. It is suspense: Dylan, at 73, keeping fate at arm's length as he looks for new lessons, nuance and solace in well-told tales. ~ David Fricke  http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/bob-dylan-shadows-in-the-night-20150203

Shadows in the Night

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