The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

08/02/15 : Shadows In The Night - Bob Dylan


My ELEVENTH visit with Mr Dylan and he's an interesting one because he feels very much like he's trading on past glories, without (for me) actually having all that many past glories to call upon. Yes, his great stuff is great, but it's spread thinly amongst a load of very average stuff - however, I found our 2020 visit considerably less annoying than expected, so I have a vague glimmer of hope.

Hmmm - all very curious. I was actually getting along with the songs nicely - they're an unexpected collection of cabaret-ish numbers which I'd really quite like if sung by someone else (Diana Krall springs to mind). But - hang on, what's this? Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Some Enchanted Evening"?!? Checking Wikipedia, I see Bob's sprung an album of Sinatra covers on me - part of me feels I should reject it but it's such a curious collection that I feel it warrants an entry. He doesn't exactly murder the songs, but he certainly doesn't improve them (although the arrangements are quite interesting) and I can't see anyone needs this in their lives - I've absolutely no idea what he was thinking. All very odd - he does have a nice 60s vibe going on the album cover though.

We're at a thoroughly undeserved #1 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a more deserved five week run. The rest of the top five are Ed, Meghan, Sam and Hozier and the next highest new entry is Kid Ink (#10), although we also have a peculiar re-entry for Dire Straits (#6) which was apparently the result of it being discounted online, which feels like a bizarre thing to type these days.

Wikipedia has way more than I was expecting on the album (180 milliPeppers) and it tells us that this is his mere 36th album. As Bob somewhat pretentiously explains it, it's not an album of covers because they've all been covered enough before - what he's doing here is UNcovering them. Yes, thank you for that. The critics, of course, loved it and it did well commercially making the top ten in most countries and getting to #1 in Ireland, Norway and Sweden and #7 in the US. When he got to #1 over here, he was the oldest male solo artist to hit the top (until Paul Simon in '16) and he still holds the record for longest span across #1 albums, having first made it with this in '63.

"Customers also listened to" Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Frank Sinatra and Cat Power (with a Dylan covers album). I'm not a fan of Bob's but I found this to be an interesting album, if only for the sheer pointlessness of it all - if you're a Bob or Frank fan then it's probably worth a listen, but you've probably already done so.

01/02/15 - Well put together, but not for me
15/02/15 - Well done, but not exactly breaking boundaries

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