Bob Dylan's New "Fallen Angels" Album Receives Critical Raves

Bob Dylan's new album, Fallen Angels, is available now in CD and vinyl, released just a few
day's shy of his 75th birthday (May, 24).   Showcasing his singular interpretive artistry on twelve classic American songs,   Fallen Angels is the 37^th studio album from Dylan and the first since last year's Shadows In The Night.  Produced by Jack Frost, Dylan's unique approach to recording the songs included refining complicated arrangements for 30-piece orchestras down to those uniquely tailored for his five-piece band.  The album can be found at Baker & Taylor's ordering platform for your library, school, store.

Critical response to Fallen Angels has been enthusiastic, with rave reviews coming in from around the globe;  Randy Lewis wrote in The Los Angeles Times, "[Dylan] immediately liberates songs from the big band/big orchestra world from which they emerged, and in which they are most frequently revisited…. [He] reaches to the blues at the core of many of these songs. Thus, they elicit the ache of romantic yearning and loss that often gets subsumed by swelling orchestral forces, background choirs or by singers who are more focused on crafting elegant vocals than finding emotional resonance.   And, Entertainment Weekly's Jim Farber opined, "Dylan alights on these words with a wry delicacy…Tellingly, he delivers these songs of love lost and cherished not with a burning passion but with the wistfulness of experience. They're memory songs now, intoned with a present sense of commitment….Standards likes these and Dylan's own songs now stand as equal American totems."

"Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City" CD Arrives June 16

Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City, featuring a previously unreleased version of Bob Dylan's "If Not For You" and 35 other essential tracks, will be releasing Tuesday, June 16.

The Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum exhibition, "Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City Presented by Citi," opened March 27, 2015 and will run through December 31, 2016. The museum will celebrate the album's launch later this summer with a concert to be held on 5th Avenue between Demonbreun Street and Korean Veterans Boulevard on July 7, 2015 at 6 pm. The line-up for the concert will be announced soon.

"Bob Dylan surprised many when he came to Nashville and began working with the city's unmatched session musicians the Nashville Cats," said Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum historian Michael Gray. "Around this same time, Johnny Cash was recruiting folk and rock musicians—including Dylan—to appear on his groundbreaking network television show. This album and Spotify playlist, with commentary from Nashville Cat Charlie Daniels, explore this magical time in 'a new Music City.'"

Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City explores the relationship between pop, rock, folk and country music through a variety of essential recordings that define an American era and sensibility that continue to shape and influence contemporary culture across the world.

Bob Dylan Announces New Studio Album, Shadows In The Night

Columbia Records announced today that Bob Dylan's new studio album, Shadows In The Night, will be released on February 3, 2015. Featuring ten tracks, the Jack Frost-produced album is the 36th studio set from Bob Dylan and marks the first new music from the artist since 2012's worldwide hit Tempest.

Upon Columbia's announcement of the album's forthcoming release, Bob Dylan commented, "It was a real privilege to make this album. I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band. That's the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. 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."  Not a "Frank Sinatra" tribute album though it certainly features many tunes made famous by ole blue eyes.

Bob Dylan's five previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while "Love and Theft" continued Dylan's Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.

Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist's most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist's first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies. Tempest received unanimous worldwide critical acclaim upon release and reached the Top 5 in 14 countries, while the artist's globe-spanning concert tours of the past few years have heavily emphasized that album's singular repertoire.

These five releases fell within a 15-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, "Things Have Changed," from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, No Direction Home, in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, Christmas In The Heart, in 2009, with all of the artist's royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.

In recent years, Bob Dylan was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." He was also the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d'honneur in 2013, Sweden's Polar Music Award in 2000, Doctorates from the University of St. Andrews and Princeton University, as well as numerous other honors. 

 

BOB DYLAN SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT TRACK LISTING:

1.  I'm A Fool To Want You  
2.  The Night We Called It A Day  
3.  Stay With Me  
4.  Autumn Leaves  
5.  Why Try to Change Me Now  
6.  Some Enchanted Evening  
7.  Full Moon And Empty Arms  
8.  Where Are You?   
9.  What'll I Do  
10.  That Lucky Old Sun