Rainy day listen
Bob’s album won’t easily give up its secrets: nor will I
Paul Morley
Sunday August 13, 2006
Observer Music Monthly
I signed a contract, something to do with giving away all my hard-earned privileges and forfeiting my ears if I breathed a word to anyone about what I heard, and this gave me the permission required at this point in history to listen in a darkened room to the new Bob Dylan album.
According to the contract I signed, I’m allowed to tell you that Dylan is a legendary rocker, the album’s called Modern Times, it has 10 tracks, it’s his first new release for five years and it unofficially completes the trilogy begun with Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. His previous album was released on 11 September 2001, so I figured it’s no wonder they want me to sign a contract before I heard his new one. If Dylan doesn’t make as much instant history as he once did, if he seems in some kind of moody exile from everything else that’s happening in rock, he remains the one true master at turning up out of the blue when the time is right, or wrong, and there’s a sudden change in the weather only he saw coming.
According to the terms of the contract I signed, I’m not allowed to tell you anything that might give the game away, but I guess I can speculate a little without ruining any secrets. Everything about the album, including the title and the cover, is thieved from some source or another, even if that source is himself. I imagine the songs are all about love and death, or the mystery of time, or the fear of loss of reputation, or the final empty monotony of the human experience. They’re probably played on instruments you’ve heard more than a million times before. He’ll be apparently shuffling the same old pack of cards, telling the same crooked story again and again, singing ‚baby‘ a lot, twanging and twitching. The calmly accrued details, the dialogue trails, the ominous warnings, the sly attempts to win some affection, to shed his confusions, to stake his claims, the abrupt way he likes to wander off the edge of a song – at first there will seem nothing new about anything to do with Modern Times
Apart from the already leaked mention of Alicia Keys, there’ll be little he mentions that couldn’t have happened a hundred years ago. Then it will hit you from high above, as Dylan, knowing what he’s up to if not where he is, advances menacingly, from the top of a mountain of memory, and quickly withdraws, round the back of his scrolling imagination, singing like he’s about to die, or about to be born. All this cliche and familiarity will rearrange itself into something diabolically unique. The whole damned thing will be disguised as quaint old yesterday but really be about today, if not tomorrow. Christ, it’s almost like I’ve already heard it, like it actually exists.
I imagine that when the album comes out, he’ll finally slip some of the new tracks into the set of his Never Ending Tour, alongside the ever-changing 15 or so great songs from the great albums that he usually plays. I imagine that the end track, ‚Ain’t Talkin“, will certainly fit in quite nicely among the classic songs he blows into his audiences‘ face like toxic smoke. Already people are talking of it as the greatest final track of all of his albums, which would place it above ‚Desolation Row‘. Just in case this really is his last complete album of songs, he’s no doubt made sure he leaves us with a roguish, indecipherable drama, as if he’s been a ghost all along, a fragmenting figment, more than a prophet, rock star or troubadour. I’m sure that at the end of the song, he’ll be walking out of sight, taking everything he’s ever done with him, rubbing away his tracks, cleaning up the fingerprints, wiping clean our memories, and the last line will be about ‚the world’s end‘.
I’ll tell you all about it when I’m allowed to tell you that I’ve heard it.
· ‚Modern Times‘ (SonyBMG) is released on 28 August
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