This text was originally published in one of the first issues of Dylanology, back when it was not yet possible to embed sound clips in Substack posts. Therefore this repost – which has been slightly revised, too, so that you have to read the whole thing again.
A poem is a naked person.
Shadows in the Night is perhaps
Dylan’s most poetic album.
On this album, the words
don’t stand in the way of the poetry
that song can express.
And conversely: on this album, the beauty of song
does not stand in the way
of the things words can express.
Confessions of a Music Guy
When Dylan released his Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart in 2009, consisting mostly of songs from Sinatra’s Christmas albums, most people probably thought of it as an amusing one-off project.
When it was followed in 2015 by Shadows in the Night, it became clear that this was serious, and with Fallen Angels and Triplicate, a certain fatigue set in – no matter how benevolently one would otherwise meet Dylan’s whims.
At least that was how I reacted. I thought two things: (1) Dylan may love these songs, but they are as far removed from his natural singing style as one can possibly get; and (2) if I want to listen to Sinatra songs, I prefer to hear them sung by Sinatra.
Therefore, Shadows in the Night was a surprise to me, once I sat down and listened properly. It puzzled me:
I’m a music guy. When I play a song or an album, I listen to the music; I rarely pay much attention to the words, even with Dylan.
With Shadows, I catch the lyrics. That’s definitely a good sign.
I’m even captured by them. And I actually care about what is being sung.
For once, the communicative process of music making is influenced by the words, and not just by the sounds of the words.
Dylan is singing! He is actually singing!
The artist who spent the past couple of decades growling his way monotonously through songs, is now actually separating pitches and making musical sense of the way they are strung together – or, as this is usually called: melody. He is singing. He actually is!
What’s more, I’ve realized (with a slight exaggeration, for rhetorical effect) that I’ve never really paid attention to the words of these songs when I’ve heard them sung by Frank Sinatra himself. I haven’t needed to, because his voice has said more than enough. When Dylan sings, on the other hand, I’m hanging on to every word. I register lyric subtleties all over the place.
The Itch
That is what has puzzled me – that’s the itch I couldn’t quite scratch: that the crow seduces me more than the nightingale does. That Dylan’s croaking does not stand in the way of communication and emotion, but rather enhances it.
A puzzle is not a problem, it’s an opportunity to investigate and gain insight. One possible reason for my reaction could be that Dylan’s way of singing these songs is akin to the “stressor” effect that Nassim Taleb has described: a slight distortion on the telephone line makes you pay more attention to the contents. I’ve used that metaphor before, in a review of Another Self Portrait.
But I don’t think that’s what is at play here. It is not simply a matter of regarding Dylan’s voice as a stressor.
It has to do with melody, melody style, and naked intimacy.
Melody and Naked Beauty
On a spectrum from mere recitation to elaborate melodiousness, Dylan tends to shape his own melodies closer to the former – closer to Gregorian Chant than to Mozart. He tends to treat melody as a carrier for lyrics rather than as artful musicianship. Which is also why his own “melodies” can take so vastly different forms when he sings them live: because they are essentially realizations of a formulaic pattern, and not melodies in the traditional sense.
When Dylan does sings melodies with a fixed sequence of tones, on the other hand – as he does on the “Sinatra” albums – the cracks become more visible: the deviations, between his usual style and the superimposed Sinatra style, but also between two different ways of relating sound to meaning. When Dylan is forced – because he forces himself – to use the more stylized and artful mode of art song rather than the more direct recitational style that is his own – when he goes Mozart rather than Gregory – he draws our attention to precisely the communicative element in singing.
It’s the cracked voice that makes it sound urgent and almost confidential when he sings: “I’m a fool! (to want you!)”
One tone in “Full Moon and Empty Arms” demonstrates more than any other Dylan’s ability to communicate in song.
“The moon is there”, he sings – to a tone that is hard to define:
Most of all it sounds like an e that is yearning upwards, but not quite making it to f. It sounds like a flub, an out-of-tune note that would have been “corrected” with auto-tune. But it’s not really painful or uncomfortable to listen to – rather, it’s sympathy-arousing.
In Sinatra’s version, it is simply a strong dissonance, a spicy tone with a logical place in a harmonic, musical chain of events:
Dylan’s singing gets more naked as the years go by, and the way he sings these melodies strengthens that feeling. We may not be quite used to hearing melodies treated like this, sung with deep earnest (this is nothing like Sid Vicious parodying “My Way”) but it is well worth getting used to.
There is no auto-tune here. There is human irregularity. There is fragility, intimacy, of a kind that translates to an almost childlike vulnerability.
Is it a coincidence that almost all the songs on Dylan’s Sinatra “hexology” are taken from Sinatra albums that came out in the years 1957–1962, Dylan’s late adolescence, the period par excellence of “almost childlike vulnerability”?
Having finally overcome my suspicion towards Dylan’s seemingly endless and pointless Sinatra experiment, I now, against all expectations, have a new album to count among my favorites. This does not mean that I understand why Dylan had to record six full albums of Sinatra songs. Also, I don’t quite hear much of a difference in character between them. But what I do understand is the sentiment behind the project, as Dylan himself has described it:
I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day. (NPR, Dec 2014)
When I first wrote this text, I came up with the phrase “A poem is a naked person” as what I thought was a pretty ingenious way of describing the “childlike vulnerability” in Dylan’s voice. Then one day, when I wanted to look up the text, I googled the title phrase – because that’s always the quickest way to find anything one has written on Substack – and I realised that someone had thought of that phrase before me. Oh well – if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.
I actually read this quote early on in 2014 and that’s what did it for me: he also had other insightful directives on this music that I do not remember, but they helped me enjoy these albums immensely.
I really thank the heavens above for an artist like Dylan, who has the wherewithal to follow his own lead and build his legacy the way he’s done.
I don’t know if there’s a record company exec somewhere to thank for this, but in case there is, thanks.
And thank you, Bob.
Keep on keeping on like a bird that flew.
“I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day. (NPR, Dec 2014)”