Kevin Morby has just announced “City Music” a new album via the fine folks at Dead Oceans. Here’s a little more on the album via the PR Team – His fourth album, “City Music” works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release “Singing Saw”, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. SingingSaw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.”
And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”
Jason Isbell’s breakout album Southeastern was a fairly introspective affair, an occasionally harrowing portrait that chronicled his efforts to get sober after years of indulging in the demon rum.
On “Hope The High Road,” the lead single for his new album The Nashville Sound, Isbell declaims that he’s “Heard enough of the white man’s blues/ I’ve sang enough about myself/ So if you’re looking for some bad news/ You can find it somewhere else.”
The track, a resilient display of no-nonsense rock and roll, acknowledges the hard road that was 2016, but insists there will be no “fighting with you down in the ditch,” perhaps a reference to the chamber of despair that social media has become. Instead, the song imagines the prospect of a better day achieved through the moral perseverance of kindred spirits.
“Do The Nixon” is the first single off Circus Devils upcoming final album ‘Laughs Last’. You can purchase it along with the band’s best of compilation entitled ‘Laughs Best: The Kids Eat It Up’ both of which were released on February 24th 2017
Robert Pollard’s freak-rock trio Circus Devils says it’s farewell with a pair of simultaneous releases for 2017. First is their 14th and final album Laughs Last, along with a best-of, double LP collection titled Laughs Best: The Kids Eat It Up (with DVD included).
On Laugh Last, Pollard and the Tobias brothers take a breathless romp through multiple styles, starting off with the brash hotdogger, ‘Get Out Of My Way When I’m In Town.’ Along the way we’re treated to the R.E.M. inflected ‘I Do the Nixon,’ the organ-fuzz stomper ‘Teenage Rooster,’ and the defiantly conventional ‘Crucified by The British Press.’ Full of high humor and low drama, Laughs Last is the bold exclamation point at the end of Circus Devils’ 16-year run.
Laughs Best (The Kids Eat it Up) –is acollection of 30 speedy deliveries from rock and roll’s Twilight Zone that will leave you exhausted, satisfied, and ready for another spin. Circus Devils’ entire mind-bending catalogue is represented here, including three songs from the brand new album Laughs Last. While there is an emphasis on friendlier numbers, there is still plenty of the trio’s prog rock psychedelia on display.
By 1997, Dinosaur Jnr had drastically altered from the band’s original incarnation. Bassist Lou Barlow had been fired before the group had been signed to a major label in 1990. Drummer Emmett “Murph” Murphy had departed after a lackluster stint on the ’93 Lollapalooza tour. Singer-guitarist J.Mascis was the last man standing.
Newly signed to Sire Records, J.Mascis released a torrent of music in the early ’90s and put out three DinosaurJr. albums in the space of four years. At the height of alternative rock’s popularity, Dinosaur Jr. got played on the radio, the albums hit the charts and MTV even embraced the band . In crafting his group’s seventh album, J.Mascis took a little more time. On some of Dinosaur Jr.’s ’90s recordings, J. Mascis was the only person featured. But it’s tough to play concerts as a power trio if you’re only one guy. Eventually, he replaced the trio’s founding members with MikeJohnson on bass and George Berz on drums. Mascis continued to have a stranglehold on the band creatively, so Dinosaur Jr.’s sound – loud, distorted with disaffected vocals from its frontman .
Also along the way, he brought in Kevin Shields Of My Bloody Valentine as an “honorary member” during the sessions for “Hand It Over”. J.Mascis and Shields had been tour mates and friends for years, so it seemed like a natural pairing, sonically.
“I remember he’d plug in different pedals and I’d play until I liked the sound, and then we’d try something with that sound,” Mascis has said, “His studio in England wasn’t too easy to work in at the time. It was weird, like a haunted house.”
Although the Dinosaur Jr. frontman thought the experience was strange, he did like the results. Mascis would later recall that he felt he was finding new ways to be excited about his band, his songs and his music.
“I definitely felt psyched again,” he has said . “I really liked the album, but then that was the point where the major label gave up on it and didn’t even tell anyone it came out. We went on tour and people didn’t even know it had been released. It was kind of depressing. But I really liked the album. It was just hard to tour because they basically didn’t do anything to promote it.”
J.Mascis recalls the troubles with Sire Records beginning when he handed over Hand It Over, on which he had written, sung, played a whole lot of instruments, produced and even created the cover art. He was clearly attached to this album, but the label executives were not impressed.
“I went to a meeting and heard the classic thing I never thought I’d hear, that I thought was just the silliest, stupid thing you used to hear if you go to a record company: ‘I don’t hear a single,’” Mascis said. “I couldn’t believe I’d actually heard that coming out of somebody’s mouth. I knew that was the end for sure – like, are you seriously saying that right now? It’s just such a cliché.”
Mascis stuck to his creative guns and he claimed the label punished Dinosaur Jr. with a lack of support for the record. Hand It Over came out on March 25th, 1997 to little fanfare. The record got some positive reviews, The band toured to promote Hand It Over, but to middling results. A strange occurrence allowed this version of Dinosaur Jr. to play one of its final gigs on The Jenny Jones Show (on a show titled “Grow Up! You’re Too Old to Party with Your Daughter”). J.Mascis put an end to the band by the end of 1997.
The Jesus And Mary Chain are set to release their long-awaited new album ‘Damage and Joy’ on March 24th, their first since ‘Munki’, back in the summer of 1998. The Reid brothers have enlisted the help of super (as in cool, not megabucks!) producer Youth and he has coaxed and cajoled these perma-scrapping siblings (still, even now!!) into producing a magnificent distillation of everything we’ve come to love about their sound.
Fuzzed up trashy or broken and blue, Jim’s honeyed voice takes us over familiar territory while William scuzzes things up in the wings. The songs are all classic Mary Chain.
With the help of Isobel Campbell, Sky Ferreira and the Reids’ own sister Linda on vocals, there’s also a freshness to their palette, bringing their much imitated sound back up to date, here in the now. It’s great to have them back!
500 limited edition 12” on Cadillac pink vinyl. Manchester all-female five-piece Pins release a new EP Bad Thing, through Haus Of Pins and features Aggrophobe, their single with the legendary Iggy Pop. Following the release of their acclaimed second album Wild Nights last year, Pins went back into the studio to work on new tracks. Recorded in a studio on the Scottish Borders last October and produced by Mark Vernon and the band themselves, the EP features 5 new tracks, which includes a cover of Joy Division’s Dead Souls. The EP opens with the teasing Bad Thing before moving into the addictive Aggrophobe, featuring Iggy Pop’s iconic vocal, leading onto the chant-like pop of All Hail and the dreamy and synth-laden In Nightmares, before ending with Pins own take on Dead Souls. The four new tracks are synonymous with Pins’ sound but also showcase a vigorous, more mature side to the band, making up a solid and impressive musical body of work.
Desperate Journalist release their second album, Grow Up, ostensibly eleven tracks of rocketing leftfield delights propelled forth with thundering rhythms, thunderously spectacular guitar and Jo Bevan’s thunderstruck vocals. Such is intense life with Desperate Journalist, one of the most potent, important DIY bands lurking on the underground scene right now.
They began as a fictional band from a fictional town featured on the Eccentronic Research Council’s 2015 concept album Johnny Rocket, Narcissist And Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan. Now The Moonlandingz have lurched, sticky and bleeding, into the real world and are releasing the first great album of 2017. Interplanetary Class Classics, released on Transgressive Records, is a feast of swirling juddering synths, wailing guitars, motorik stomp and extraordinary songwriting. The Moonlandingz have proven themselves to be one of the best live bands in the UK (“Magnificent, cosmic and batshit!” said The Quietus. “Feral antics and louche anarchy!” said The Guardian) and now they’ve produced an album of proper weird catchy glorious filthy pop. The Moonlandingz is Eccentronic Research Council’s Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer in cahoots with Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi (aka frontman Johnny Rocket) and Saul Adamczewski. They recorded the album with Sean Lennon at his studio in upstate New York. Also on the record: Randy Jones the Cowboy from The Village People, Rebecca Taylor from Slow Club, drummer Ross Orton, bassist Mairead O’Connor, Phil Oakey and YOKO fucking ONO, who sings and yowls on epic closer This Cities Undone.
Sonic Jesus is an Italian musical project lead by multi-instrumentalist Tiziano Veronese. Since signing to Fuzz Club, the project has released a split single with The Black Angels and been remixed by Sonic Boom aka PeteKember. Their internationally acclaimed debut ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’; an industrial barrage of hypnotic, dark psychedelia. Sonic Jesus’ new album ‘Grace’ goes beyond the past boundaries, pushing towards enthralling melodic horizons and modern pounding beats, delivered by a new-found pop sensibility. There’s still a darkness brooding beneath the noise but these new tracks see the project take on a magnificent and insatiable new form.
Limited to 1000 Copies. Long Time is the second single off Blondie’s new album Pollinator and comes backed with exclusive B-Side Breaks.
On her first proper album as Jay Som, Melina Duterte, 22, solidifies her rep as a self-made force of sonic splendor and emotional might. If last year’s aptly named Turn Into compilation showcased a fuzz-loving artist in flux – chronicling her mission to master bedroom recording – then the rising Oakland star’s latest, Everybody Works, is the LP equivalent of mission accomplished. Duterte is as DIY as ever – writing, recording, playing, and producing every sound beyond a few backing vocals – but she takes us places we never could have imagined, wedding lo-fi rock to hi-fi home orchestration, and weaving evocative autobiographical poetry into energetic punk, electrified folk, and dreamy alt-funk. Everybody Works was made in three furious, caffeinated weeks. She came home from the road, moved into a new apartment, set up her bedroom studio and dove in. Duterte even ditched most of her demos, writing half the LP on the spot and making lushly composed pieces like Lipstick Stains all the more impressive. While the guitar-grinding Jay Som we first fell in love with still reigns on shoegazey shredders like 1 Billion Dogs and in the melodic distortions of Take It, we also get the sublimely spacious synth-pop beauty of Remain, and the luxe, proggy funk of One More Time, Please.
Fifth album (third for Full Time Hobby) from Samantha Crain, following 2015’s “Under Branch & Thorn & Tree” and the 2014 album “Kid Face.”
Written over 4 months at the back end of winter whilst at home in Norman, Oklahoma, You Had Me At Goodbye was penned whilst Samantha was working shifts at a pizza place to save up money for touring, recording, paying bills, and as a self-confessed ‘film nerd,’ binge watching movies. “Oklahoma is beautiful but my relationship with it is complicated. There are mountains, plains, prairies, rolling hills, high deserts and plateaus, with an amazing creative community of people making beautiful visual art, interesting films and loud music. But it’s extremely Christian, conservative, and whilst people say it’s ‘friendly,’ really, people are only friendly if you’re white and aren’t dressed unconventionally. I feel welcome and alienated all at once.”
Bolstered by the visionary production of John Vanderslice (Spoon, the Mountain Goats, Strand of Oaks), mixed and engineered by Jacob Winik (The Magnetic Fields, Hot Buttered Rum), Samantha returned to the Bay Area in California to, once again, record the album in analog at Tiny Telephone Studio.
Iggy Pop had hit bottom after the messy breakup of the Stooges and he needed help, and when friend and fan David Bowie offered to lend him a hand, he was smart and grateful enough to accept. Bowie produced Iggy’s first solo album, The Idiot, and after Iggy set up a tour to promote the record, Bowie put together the band and tagged along as their keyboard player. Bowie’s presence insured a larger audience than Iggy had attracted during the grim final days of his band, and he was determined to prove he could deliver the goods without making a spectacle of himself or collapsing into a drug-sodden heap on-stage. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with Iggy’s body of work knows the last thing you want from one of his live shows is a professional-sounding performance without a sense of danger, and unfortunately, that’s what the audience got during this March 21st, 1977 show in Cleveland, OH, part of a three-night stand Iggy and the band would perform at the Agora Ballroom. Iggy & Ziggy: Cleveland ’77 finds Iggy in fine voice, and at a time when he had a lot to prove, he leaves no doubt he was a solid musician and showman, singing with a sense of control and dynamics he couldn’t approach with the Raw Power-era Stooges. However, Iggy also seems clearly afraid to push this material too far, and the caution robs the songs (nine of which are drawn from the Stooges‘ songbook) of much of their life force. Even worse, guitarist Ricky Gardiner doesn’t seem to know what to do with the Stooges material — he’s at least as skillful as Ron Asheton or JamesWilliamson, but his attack is so toothless and polite that he reduces some of the greatest rock songs ever to mush. (Bowie’s keyboards are not nearly as ill-advised but they don’t fit the old material very well, though Hunt Sales and Tony Sales are a great rhythm section who do what they can to give Iggy the energy he needs.) Some of the material from this show also appeared on Iggy’s lamentable live album TV Eye Live.
British shoegazers Ride will release their first album in over 20 years, “Weather Diaries”, June 16th via Wichita Recordings. The British band credits Americans for inspiring their reunion and reclaiming the name of their genre: “They didn’t use it as a pejorative”
Ride also unveiled a mind-bending new video for lead single, “Charm Assault.” The Jean de Oliveira-directed clip is a psychedelic collage that mixes warped archival footage of everyday life, political unrest and military actions with shots of Ride performing the blistering track.
Weather Diaries follows Ride’s 1996 album, Tarantula. DJ Erol Alkan produced the record and longtime collaborator Alan Moulder mixed the record. Moulder previously worked on Ride’s beloved 1990 LP, Nowhere and produced its follow-up, Going Blank Again. Along with “Charm Assault,”Ride previously shared album track, “Home Is A Feeling” .
Ride announced their reunion in 2014 after the break up of the band Beady Eye, singer/guitarist Andy Bell’s project with Oasis’ Liam Gallagher (Bell previously played in Oasis as well). In February 2015, Bell and co-singer/guitarist Mark Gardener played an acoustic set, after which the full band embarked on a world tour that featured several festival stops,
“Charm Assault” is taken from Ride’s forthcoming album, “Weather Diaries”, due to be released on the 16th June 2017 by Wichita Recordings. The album was produced by Erol Alkan and mixed by the band’s longtime collaborator, Alan Moulder.
Andy Bell says “Charm Assault is a pretty straightforward expression of frustration and disgust at the people who currently run our country. The tour in 2015 was a good way of reminding us what we were good at in the first place and Charm Assault feels like a natural continuation from our peak. When we started writing together again we tried to imagine we’d kept on making music all this time, and this was just the latest one.”
The official video for Ride’s first new material for twenty years, conceived by Anton Newcombe & Jean de Oliveira
Record Store Day has unveiled a long list of releases making it to your independent stores around the world with some specials and exclusives only releases. They include a Smiths 7″ featuring two unreleased takes of old songs, a couple Prince singles, a first-time vinyl release for André 3000’s Beatles cover made for a Nike ad in 2010, and a bunch more. Animal Collective are also releasing a new live EP, the War On Drugs also announced that they’ll put out their first song since 2014’s Lost In The Dream via a 12″ on RSD, the Flaming Lips are putting out a new live album, and Against Me! has two new songs on a 7″.
Also on the plate here and internationally are crowd-pleasers including a panoply of Prince single re-releases (including Batdance, Partyman, Sign ‘O’ The Times and more), exclusive action from the late David Bowie, the 10th-anniversary re-release of Alexisonfire‘s seminal Crisis, The Cure‘s Greatest Hits and Acoustic Hits, Santana‘s Live At Woodstock, Coheed & Cambria‘s third album, the ostentatiously titled Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume I: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble‘s Live At Carnegie Hall, a shaped picture disc of Toto‘s Africa and Rosanna, Ben Folds and the WA Symphony Orchestra‘s Live In Perth and even Johnny Cash‘s The Johnny Cash Children’s Album, among a pile of other appealing records.
Also pretty exciting is the news out of the UK that The The will be releasing their first single in 15 years with new cut You Can’t Stop What’s Comingcasually announced by long-time collaborator Johnny Marr on Twitter while, notably, American RSD stores will be stocking a vinyl pressing of the Space Jam soundtrack (OK fine, yes, and a bunch of other cool releases).
Record Store Day 2017 is Saturday 22nd April.
Both the UK and US have full lists of their releases available online (here and here, respectively), while Australia’s is a little less centralised but still easily searchable via the local Record Store Day website; we’ve done our best to compile the list as it stands at the time of writing.
In alphabetical order, you’ll be able to get your mitts on (probably among several other titles):
2016 Golden Era Cypher
A.B. Original — Reclaim Australia (Indigenous flag-coloured vinyl)
Alexisonfire — Crisis
Alice In Chains — Get Born Again/What The Hell Have I (double 7″ single)
Animal Collective — Meeting Of The Waters EP
Anna Calvi — Live At Meltdown
Anni-Frid Lyngstad — Frida
Auli’i Cravalho — How Far I’ll Go B/W You’re Welcome
Bastille — Comfort Of Strangers
Ben Folds & WASO — Live In Perth
Black Lips — Good Bad Not Evil, 200 Million Thousand, Arabia Mountain and Underneath The Rainbow
Blackstreet — No Diggity
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band — Hammersmith 1975
Catfish & The Bottlemen — The Balcony
Coheed & Cambria — Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. I: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness
Curtis Knight ft. Jimi Hendrix — Live At George’s Club 20
Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin — Hard Travelin’
David Bowie — Cracked Actor
Dennis Wilson — Bambu (The Caribou Sessions)
Dirty Three — UFKUKO
Dolly Parton — Puppy Love
Elton John — 17/11/1970
Field Music — Tones Of Town
Filthy Friends — Any Kind Of Crowd
Flat Duo Jets — Wild Wild Love
Follakzoid ft. J Spaceman — London Sessions LP
Gerard Way — Into The Cave We Wander (12″ picture disc)
Prince — Little Red Corvette (7″ picture disc), Sign ‘O’ The Times, Batdance, I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man, I Wish U Heaven, Partyman, Pop Life
Procol Harum — A Whiter Shade Of Pale (50th anniversary EP)
Ra Ra Riot — Ra Ra Riot EP
Robert Johnson — The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection
Santana — Live At The Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 16, 1969
Sex Pistols — God Save Sex Pistols
Soul Assassins — Muggs Presents: The Soul Assassins Chapter 1
Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble — Live At Carnegie Hall
Sublime — Badfish EP
T Rex — Electric Warrior (gold vinyl)
The Black Angels — Death Song
The Chemical Brothers — C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L
The Cure — Greatest Hits and Acoustic Hits
The Gun Club — Live At Manila Club, Florence, Italy, 26 November 1983
The Lumineers — Seeds 1: Angela & Long Way From Home
The Veldt — Symmetry B/W Slowdown
The Who — Quadrophenia (green vinyl)
Tom Iansek — Small Town Hero, Top Of The Tree
Totally Unicorn — Horse Hugger
Toto — Africa/Rosanna picture disc
Townes Van Zandt — Live At Austin City Limits
Trevor Jones — The Dark Crystal: The Original Soundtrack
Australian only releases with a special-edition releases including a new vinyl release of A.B. Original‘s AMP-winning Reclaim Australia, pressed into the colours of the Indigenous flag, Totally Unicorn‘s Horse Hugger, Tom Iansek‘s Oz-exclusive Small Town Hero, Top Of The Tree, Methyl Ethel‘s Architecture Lecture/Lagotto Romagnolo, Dirty Three‘s UFKUKO EP and more.
Listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s first album of new material in 19 years is like meeting up with an incorrigible old friend. Maybe there are a few more wrinkles and grey hairs but the original spirit is most definitely still there. Fuzzy, distorted guitars and a gallows humour may still predominate but maybe there is now also a certain maturity in the mix. Produced by Youth and featuring vocal contributions from Sky Ferreira, Isobel Campbell,Linda Reid and Bernadette Denning, as well as including a number of tunes that have been previously aired on Jim Reid solo projects, “Damage and Joy” sounds remarkably coherent and is a triumphant return to the fray.
There is always a slight nervy feeling when your favourite bands get back together and, given that the Reid Brothers’ long-standing assertions that it was never going to happen, but playing Damage and Joy for the first time is no different. However, by kicking off with waves of distorted guitar and the tambourine and drum machine-driven “Amputation”, the Mary Chain grab things by the scruff of the neck straightaway. Damage and Joy is no one-note wonder though, and sweet duets like “Always Sad” and “The Two of Us” and the down tempo track “Loz Feliz” add plenty of variety to the proceedings.
Nevertheless, it is the scuzzy rock’n’roll tracks like “Facing up to the Facts” and “Get on Home” where Jim declares “I spent a night with a blow-up girl and some LSD”, that make it crystal clear that the band have hit the ground running and have a good deal more than paying the bills in mind.
It’s inherently unfair to compare an iconic band’s most seminal work to anything it might produce 20 years later. Artists are people Just Like Us, and their lives shift and adjust with good years and bad. The passage of time can and will ultimately translate into new sonic directions that may or may not resemble their initial output. Yet, when it comes to William and Jim Reid of Scottish post-punk figureheads
Australian Post Rock band Sleepmakeswaves release their long awaited third studio full length album Made of Breath Only
Following on from 2014’s acclaimed LP Love Of Cartography, Made Of Breath Only is a wonderfully ambitious, sonically lush collection of world-class post-rock only hinted at through its lauded first single, Tundra.
The album which runs for just shy of an hour contains a wealth of engaging, imaginative soundscapes that defy lengthy runtimes (midpoint track The Edge Of Everything spans more than 10-and-a-half minutes) to remain captivating through peaks, troughs, dynamic shifts and all manner of other aural tricks over which the band has developed a formidable command through the years.
Sleepmakeswaves are a notoriously hard-working outfit, and have been on the road consistently this year; their 2017 got seriously under way with a support slot for US juggernauts Underoath in February and most recently saw them knock over an extensive tour of China earlier this month.
This is a band that has truly clawed their way from the underground to some seriously lofty heights over the course of their career, and you can make yourself a part of the adventure (if you haven’t already) at any one of their upcoming shows.
Bringing It All Back Home is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in March 1965 by Columbia Records. The album is divided into an electric and an acoustic side. On side one of the original LP, Dylan is backed by an electric rock and roll band—a move that further alienated him from some of his former peers in the folk song community. Likewise, on the acoustic second side of the album, he distanced himself from the protest songs with which he had become earlier identified (such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”), as his lyrics continued their trend towards the abstract and personal. although the acoustic side included some tracks in which other instruments were backing up Dylan and his guitar, but no drums were used.
The album reached the top ten of the Billboad Albums chart, the first of Dylan’s LPs to break into the US top 10. It also topped the UK charts later that Spring. The lead-off track, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, became Dylan’s first single to chart in the US, This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album.
“She Belongs To Me” extols the bohemian virtues of an artistic lover whose creativity must be constantly fed (“Bow down to her on Sunday / Salute her when her birthday comes. / For Halloween buy her a trumpet / And for Christmas, give her a drum.”)
“Maggies Farm” is Dylan’s declaration of independence from the protest folk movement. Punning on Silas McGee’s Farm, where he had performed “Only A Pawn In Their Game”at a civil rights protest in 1963 (featured in the film Dont Look Back), Maggie’s Farm recasts Dylan as the pawn and the folk music scene as the oppressor. Rejecting the expectations of that scene as he turns towards loud rock’n’roll, self-exploration, and surrealism, Dylan sings: “They say sing while you slave / I just get bored.”
“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is a low-key love song, a “hallucinatory allegiance, a poetic turn that exposes the paradoxes of love (‘She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all’)…[it] points toward the dual vulnerabilities that steer ‘Just Like A Woman.’ In both cases, a woman’s susceptibility is linked to the singer’s defenseless infatuation.” Among other things, Bringing It All Back Home had a substantial effect on the language of a generation.
“Outlaw Blues” explores Dylan’s desire to leave behind the pieties of political folk and explore a bohemian, “outlaw” lifestyle. Straining at his identity as a protest singer, Dylan knows he “might look like Robert Ford” (who assassinated Jesse James), but he feels “just like a Jesse James”.
“On The Road Again” catalogs the absurd affectations and degenerate living conditions of bohemia. The song concludes: “Then you ask why I don’t live here / Honey, how come you don’t move?”
“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” narrates a surreal experience involving the discovery of America, “Captain Arab” (a clear reference to Captain Ahab Of Moby Dick fame), and numerous bizarre encounters. It is the longest song in the electric section of the album, starting out as an acoustic ballad before being interrupted by laughter, and then starting back up again with an electric blues rhythm. The music is so similar in places to Another Side of Bob Dylan’s “Motorpsycho Nitemare” as to be indistinguishable from it but for the electric instrumentation. The song can be best read as a highly sardonic, non-linear (historically) dreamscape parallel cataloguing of the discovery, creation and merits (or lack thereof) of the United States.
“Gates Of Eden” builds on the developments made with “Chimes of Freedom” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”. “Of all the songs about sixties self-consciousness and generation-bound identity, none forecasts the lost innocence of an entire generation better than ‘Gates of Eden,’” “Sung with ever-forward motion, as though the words were carving their own quixotic phrasings, these images seem to tumble out of Dylan with a will all their own; he often chops off phrases to get to the next line.” (This is the only song on the album that is mono on the stereo release and all subsequent reissues.)
One of Dylan’s most ambitious compositions, “Its AlrightMa (I’m Only Bleeding) is arguably one of Dylan’s finest songs. Heylin wrote that it “opened up a whole new genre of finger-pointing song, not just for Dylan but for the entire panoply of pop”, A fair number of Dylan’s most famous lyrics can be found in this song: “He not busy being born / Is busy dying”; “It’s easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred”; “Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”; “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”; “If my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” In the song Dylan is again giving his audience a road map to decode his confounding shift away from politics. Amidst a number of laments about the expectations of his audience (“I got nothing, Ma, to live up to”) and the futility of politics (“There is no sense in trying”; “You feel to moan but unlike before / You discover that you’d just be one more / Person crying”), Dylan tells his audience how to take his new direction: “So don’t fear if you hear / A foreign sound to your ear / It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.”
The album closes with “Its All Over Now Baby Blue” described as “one of those saddened good-bye songs a lover sings when the separation happens long after the relationship is really over, when lovers know each other too well to bother hiding the truth from each other any longer … What shines through “Baby Blue” is a sadness that blots out past fondness, and a frustration at articulating that sadness at the expense of the leftover affection it springs from.” If Paul Clayton is indeed the Baby Blue he had in mind, as has been suggested, Dylan was digging away at the very foundation of Clayton’s self-esteem.” However, the lyric easily fits in with the main theme of the album, Dylan’s rejection of political folk, taking the form of a good-bye to his former, protest-folk self, according to the Rough Guide to Bob Dylan. According to this reading, Dylan sings to himself to “Leave your stepping stones [his political repertoire] behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left [folkies], they will not follow you … Strike another match, go start anew.” The only musician besides Dylan to play on the song is Bill Lee on Bass guitar.
In a interview Dylan said, My thoughts, my personal needs have always been expressed through my songs; you can feel them there even in ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. When I write a song, when I make a record, I don’t think about whether it’ll sell millions of copies. I only think about making it, the musical end-product, the sound, and the rhythmic effect of the words. ~Bob Dylan (to Sandra Jones, June 1981)
A surrealist work heavily influenced by Rimbaud (most notably for the “magic swirlin’ ship” evoked in the lyrics), The album was hailed it as a leap “beyond the boundaries of folk song once and for all, with one of [Dylan’s] most inventive and original melodies.
“Mr. Tambourine Man” was “Dylan’s pied-piper anthem of creative living and open-mindedness…a lot of these lines are evocative without holding up to logic, even though they ring worldly.” called “rock’s most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it’s done acoustically.”
One of Dylan’s most celebrated albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” was soon hailed as one of the greatest albums in rock history.
In a 1986 interview, film director John Hughes cited it as so influential on him as an artist that upon its release, “Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another.”The album closes with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue“, However, the lyric easily fits in with the main theme of the album, Dylan’s rejection of political folk, taking the form of a good-bye to his former, protest-folk self, according to the Rough Guide to Bob Dylan. According to this reading, Dylan sings to himself to “Leave your stepping stones [his political repertoire] behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left [folkies], they will not follow you…Strike another match, go start a new.” The only musician besides Dylan to play on the song Bill Lee on bass guitar.
Other songs and sketches recorded at this session: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “She Belongs to Me”, “On the Road Again”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”, “You Don’t Have to Do That”, “California,” and “Outlaw Blues”, all of which were original compositions.
….when we recorded Bringing It All Back Home, that was like a break through point, it’s the kind of music I’ve been striving to make and I believe that in time people will see that. It’s hard to explain it, it’s that indefinable thing..
~Bob Dylan
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