From the Archives: The Kingdom of the Shadowy In-Between
An Analysis of the Cracks in Dylan's film noir concert ”Shadow Kingdom” (2021)
Deep down, back in the fourth issue of Dylanology, was buried a text that I think deserves to be dug up from the archives: an attempt to study not so much the way individual songs are played or arranged, but the way the concert as a whole is arranged, how the songs are pieced together – in short: how Dylan shapes a show. This is why I called Shadow Kingdom “Dylan’s most interesting musical work”.
For this issue, I’ve added the soundclips to go with the music examples. That should make this an even more pleasant read.
The pandemic brought a temporary end to the Never-Ending Tour, but it could not stop Bob Dylan’s constant, creative outpouring. First there was the monumental “Murder Most Foul”, which grew into an entire album – one of his best ever, as it turned out – and on 18 July 2021 we finally got what many of us had been waiting for: new live material, streamed to anyone who wanted – in itself a revolutionary new concept.
It wasn’t live, of course. It was a film noir, prerecorded and presented so as to look like a live performance. Much has been said and written about the presentation, the acting, the musicians, and the assessment of what path Dylan was on at the moment, post-NET, post-MMF, post Corona.
As a Dylan fan, I find all these aspects interesting, but as a musicologist my primary interest is: what is he doing musically? It turns out that Shadow Kingdom is in fact a highly interesting and intriguing work of musical art, especially in the carefully elaborated transitions between the songs – the Kingdom of the shadowy in-between.
If you haven’t watched Shadow Kingdom yet, I recommend you do so. Guitar tabs and lyric transcriptions for most of the song versions are available on dylanchords.com
Harmonic Cohesion
“Cohesion” is a word from Latin which means to stick together. That particular concept has never been high on Dylan’s agenda, harmonically speaking. I have discussed this on several occasions before: Dylan for example avoids the Dominant, and especially the dominant seventh – precisely the chord types that more than any create cohesion.
A music theory footnote here: I use “tonic” as a synonym for the keynote,
“dominant” = the chord on the fifth scale step (so in C, the dominant is G), and
“subdominant” = the chord on the fourth step (F).
Then came his long love-relationship with Sinatra songs, and these are all about harmonic cohesion: the natural transition from one chord to the next, based on the resolution of tension and on perceived melodic lines, not just in the tune itself, but in all kinds of middle voices, heard or just imagined, implied.
The question on everyone’s mind during the never-ending pilgrimage through the Sinatra catalogue was: what would it lead to? Would we see Dylan writing jazz ballads and big band pop?
As I indicated in my reviews of the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs, it is not that the Sinatra influence is obvious, but there are signs, most prominently in “Black Rider”, Dylan’s most complex song ever.
Coming Over Here From Over There
Some of the songs from the most recent years of touring were played in arrangements that demonstrate a heightened sense of harmonic cohesion (this can e.g. be seen in the numerous rearrangements of Tangled Up In Blue, presented in the last two parts of my TUIB series, covering 1975–2006 and 2007–2018). This is however not the case with Shadow Kingdom, where the arrangements are, if anything, simplified, rather than more complex.
Nevertheless, Shadow Kingdom may well be the most interesting piece of music from Dylan’s hand in a very long time, primarily because of what happens where we usually don’t look, in the intermediary doodlings in the shadows between the songs.
In this sense, it is worth regarding all of Shadow Kingdom as one coherent piece of music, where cohesion is at work not so much within as between the songs. The transitions, despite their fleeting, ephemeral character, are actually worked out in great detail, at times emphasising harmonic relations that exist in the songs themselves, other times concealing the interrelations, fooling us to believe we are on firm ground when we are not, and consistently working with a small number of motifs and patterns and with the order of the songs and the keys in which they are played.
I will go through Shadow Kingdom with this in mind, completely disregarding the singing, the acting, the filming, focussing only on the interludes, the way cohesion is created, and the patterns that are used to this end.
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