Welcome

Welcome to my 'Evert Listens to Dylan'-blog.
In this blog I describe my listening experiences to 'Bob Dylan - The Complete Album Collection, Vol. 1'.
(I love that 'Vol. 1' - as if Vol. 2 with another 50 or so CDs is to appear soon).
If you want to know why, read the very first blog entry of this blog.
Comments welcome!
And may I invite you to check my other blog, 'Everts World of Music'?

donderdag 25 mei 2017

12. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

I am going to be very short on this one. I knew "Knocking' on Heaven's Door". For the rest, if ever there will be an opportunity to see the movie, having heard the sound track will surely be another way of making connections to the moving.

11. New Morning

Long, long time ago I wrote an entry here. The thing is, as I wrote earlier: I keep going back to those 3 albums of the mid-1960s. I can't get enough listening to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. And occasionally I go back to the albums before that. So there I am: supposed to be walking in a forward direction, but after having travelled a mile or so I keep returning on my earlier footsteps, walking back and forth. It seems to become a form of the nowadays so popular mindfulness: abiding in what is already there, rather then adding to it.

Well, anyway. It is nearly summer holiday by now. And New Morning was the album I listened to last summer holiday, when we were on a camping in Luxemburg. The album has stuck to my memories of that holiday. It wasn't the best one we ever had - a camping slightly too crowdy, and because of a hurt foot I couldn't do the hiking I had hoped to be doing with the family; so we were rather stuck on the camping. It was nice enough, however. And the songs of the album do remind me immediately of the camping, of sun, of making a coffee and then sitting on the veranda of our holiday cottage at 11 o'clock in the morning, of doing the dishes and listening to 'Day of the Locusts' and seeing the face of David Crosby ("his head was exploding", as Dylan sings) and hearing in the recording the chirping of the locusts - and now I am thinking about the story behind that song, about Dylan getting a Princeton honorary degree and being upset because he had to wear a robe and hat for the ceremony, and I am thinking of my own inauguration ceremony in fall where I indeed have to wear a robe and hat - a Harry Potter disguise, in a sense, which my two youngest kids like because they have been reading and watching the Potter oeuvre very intensely lately. But of course last year summer I did not know I would have a inauguration ceremony coming a year later...

And in that way the 'webs of meaning' keep on forming around the Dylan oeuvre (having visited a concert recently hooks me up especially to the idea that I 'Went to See the Gypsy', another song at the album). I like this album - apart from 'If Dogs Run Free' because the scatting of the jazz singer in that song puts me off; to me it's a form of senseless virtuosity, something I don't like in jazz in general. It sounds too convinced to my ears - the 'listen what I can do, isn't it great'-atmosphere doesn't connect to what I have constructed over the years as what music in essence is for me personally.

But for the rest, a fine album. One which I do replay occasionally, if I want to listen to a relaxed Dylan and find myself mentally on a veranda at about 11 o'clock in the morning in a summer's holiday.