It doesn’t matter why a “ time bomb in my heart” would be a good thing. It’s unclear but irrelevant whether Dylan faces love or apocalypse. We have the necessary staples for blues, folk or country – vague religion, a hint of romance, nostalgia, lingering melancholy. In his easy shuffle, Dylan plays less with allusion that is typical for this era and more with cultural signifiers, a casual semiotic game. The mix of sound, train imagery, and allusion gives the track an edge of hyperreality we aren’t really thinking about Dust Bowl transportation or old-time factory whistles, but we settle into our parallel ideas about history. By 2012, Dylan was five proper albums into yet another renaissance, and his band by now sounded less like a throwback to a mythic past and more like the current sound of Dylan’s Americana. He doesn’t sound much like Jimmie Rodgers here, but that’s the sort of image he wants to sketch. With this opening cut from Tempest, Dylan suggests a different era, bringing back old-time railroads. It doesn’t dodge it – fans continue to debate whether the song refers to a train or a tornado (or both) – but it has a different set of concerns. If many of Dylan’s most memorable tracks rely on interpretive ambiguity, “Duquesne Whistle” skirts the question. I’ll remember the past year for plenty of bad reasons, but I’ll also remember it as Our Year of Bob Dylan. For the last eight (!) months, it’s been a pleasure to bond and fight over song after song with my fellow Dylan obsessives here at the site. Having so many points – both the failures and successes – of possible connection means that no matter where you are and no matter who you find yourself with, you can probably talk Dylan. Few artists have ever loomed larger than Dylan, or cast such a wide net over the culture. That is, in the end, what makes these songs – from 1962’s Bob Dylan onwards – endure. Take this how you will, but Triplicate is the only Bob Dylan album my grandmother and I both love. And whatever their individual worth, Dylan the artist needed to live with these songs to give us his latest masterwork. Even a Dylan fan as dovish as I am on these records wouldn’t place them in the top echelon of his albums, but their near-absence below is not relative to their quality, only indicative of the towering stature of the albums that bookend this detour. The trio of albums on which Dylan conjured the spirit of Sinatra – Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels and the trilogy-within-the-trilogy Triplicate – are represented by only one song on our list. In between he did something that is not at all unusual for an aging rock star, but which – given Dylan’s resistance to most aging rock-star tropes – seems bizarre: he entered his American Songbook Era. With 2012’s Tempest, Dylan put an exclamation mark on the period he inaugurated in 1997 with Time Out of Mind, and with last year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways he has – may-he-live-so-long – inaugurated a new phase of productivity. Like the 90s, Dylan spent most of the last ten-ish years recording songs he did not write, so the music surveyed here lacks the “neat” cogency of a decade like the 6’0s. We have stretched the “decade” qualification to include everything Dylan has released since 2010.
#Bob dylans complicated song series
This final entry in our series is a bit unusual, though.
Such was the case with our previous entry on the 2000s, which our own Peter Tabakis dubbed Dylan’s third imperial phase. Sometimes we had to pan for gold – the ’90s – and other times the obvious superiority of the music spoke for itself. For every decade after Dylan’s universally recognized classic phase we have made the case – to a greater or lesser degree – that there was more to the story of, say, the ’80s than what the average listener might have heard. If you have followed us this far, marching through the decades of Dylan’s incomparable career, you may have noticed a pattern emerging.
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