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."



Bob Dylan's six 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 was released in 2006 and 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.    Shadows In The Night, on which Dylan paid tribute to Frank Sinatra with distinctive interpretations of ten songs previously recorded by Sinatra, debuted in the Top Ten in 14 countries.  The album entered the charts at #1 in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland, #2 in Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland, #3 in Austria, Japan and Spain, #6 in Germany and Belgium, #8 in Finland and #10 in Canada.  The album also debuted at #6 in the United States, making it the artist's 17th studio album to debut in the Top 10 in this country.

These six releases fell within a 19-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 and has sold more than 125 million records around the world.