Down in the Basement, Trying to Do Dylan
Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops are the most successful in putting Dylan’s words to music in a meaningful way.
For the past 50 years, songwriters of all kinds have been trying to write Bob Dylan songs with various degrees of success. The list of people doing this is long and includes not only the singer-songwriters who immediately followed in Dylan’s wake but also groups such as The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and tons of musicians after them. Sometime in the past year (maybe a little longer) it was announced that Bob Dylan had discovered a bunch of lyrics he wrote in 1967 but never used and had given them to T Bone Burnett to do something with. Burnett gathered a group of songwriters who happened to be multi-instrumentalists, put them in a studio and had them create the music. The result was a band called The New Basement Tapes, and the just released album Lost On The River. Songs from the project started appearing as internet videos sometime last spring and late in the summer all this was complicated by the announcement of the complete Basement Tapes being released the week before Lost On the River was due to hit the market.
The initial songs from the project were not exactly impressive. They sounded overproduced, didn’t sound like the (real) Basement Tapes or Bob Dylan songs. As more songs from the project were released as videos, the music started improving and showed that the first songs released were not necessarily indicative of the feel of the entire album.
My feeling all along about this particular record was I wanted to hear the entire album as an album and hear how it flowed and how the songs worked with each other before rendering any kind of judgment. As an album, Lost On The River is actually quite enjoyable. The various songs and singers are kind of presented in a circle with the person who co-wrote the song being the singer with a couple of exceptions where more people were involved in the writing. It is best appreciated if you put aside any preconceived notions of Bob Dylan or The Basement Tapes and meet the album on its own terms. That way the lyrics seem to find you on their own and a few listens in, you might imagine how Dylan might have delivered these songs.
The fact all the main people involved, Elvis Costello, Jim James, Taylor Goldsmith, Rhiannon Giddens and Marcus Mumford play and sing on most of the tracks gives the album a more cohesive feel than it would have had everyone had recorded in separate studios with their own bands. Each person sings lead on three songs and everyone involved came up with at least one winner and some hit it out of the park every time.
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