Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom album review — old songs beckon with new charms

Receive free Albums updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Albums news every morning.

Cover songs are like rhymes. There’s the original thing, and then there’s the follow-up that resembles it. The best covers fit their source material like a rhyming couplet, adding something that wasn’t there before but clicking into place as though always meant to be. Which brings us to the new versions of old songs in Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom.

This is the soundtrack to a concert film released in 2021 after the pandemic forced Dylan off the road. The film showed him performing with a masked band in a fictional Marseille bar (actually a Californian stage set). The music wasn’t really being played live. The tracks had been pre-recorded with uncredited musicians understood to include roots music specialist T-Bone Burnett and Don Was of Was (Not Was).

The style filters material written when Dylan was younger through the beguiling soundworld of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, which came out as he prepared to enter his eighties. The idea of an older man looking back at his younger self’s work is the subject of the novella The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad, the seafaring author with whom Dylan is familiar (his portrait appeared on the record sleeve of the album Desire). Could there be a half-rhyme here with Shadow Kingdom and its imaginary staging in a Mediterranean port?

Such mazy correspondences are encouraged by Dylan’s fanciful use of rhyme. “You can almost think that you’re seeing double,” he croons with theatrical emphasis in Shadow Kingdom’s opening moments. The word “double” builds its rhymed home here on a preceding line’s “rubble”. Meanwhile, the music makes a new abode for “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, initially released in 1971 with The Band.

The original is a piano-led number with a forceful vocal and exuberant comic tone, small-scale but with big ambitions. It now has harmonica, accordion and acoustic guitar in jaunty comradeship between zydeco and gypsy jazz. Dylan’s voice is grizzled, crumbling, eternal: an ancient monument. He seems to suppress a chuckle as he rhymes “Colosseum” with “hardly stand to see ’em”. The song’s comedy has returned, but this time it’s warmer, less needling.

“Queen Jane Approximately” loses its taunting edge and acquires a plaintive air of consolation. “What Was It You Wanted” is slowed down into a majestic noir-western brooder. “Watching the River Flow” is rockabilly with a gruff twinkle. “Wish I was back in the city in my true love’s arms,” Dylan rasps with gusto: “She likes older men, they can’t resist her charms.” The lyrics aren’t in the 1971 original. Like its companions, this redone old song beckons us back with new charms.

★★★★☆

‘Shadow Kingdom’ is released by Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings