For a cover album, Bob Dylan’s “Shadows in the Night” is full of surprises.
It is surprising to begin with that Dylan, who in 35 previous studio releases has never produced an album devoid of original content, would opt to make one at the ripe old age of 73.
It is more surprising that Dylan would choose as his subject the pop standards made famous by the late Frank Sinatra, since Sinatra, as the gods of music go, was Dylan’s polar opposite.
Dylan, the archetypal bohemian, has spent half a century reinventing his sound, leaping from folk to blues to rock to country to gospel. While his songwriting has always been transcendent, his nasally croak polarized listeners even in his prime, and has grown hoarse and cracked with age.
Sinatra, in contrast, was a straight-laced heartthrob who stuck to the standards of Tin Pan Alley, wrote only a token few of his own songs, and built his career entirely on the strength of his velvety croon.
On paper, “Dylan does Sinatra” sounds like a marriage of the worst of both worlds, capturing neither Dylan’s pitch-perfect lyricism nor Sinatra’s triumphant vocals.
The most surprising thing about “Shadows in the Night,” then, is simply that it’s so darn good.
From the opening notes of the album’s first track, “I’m a Fool to Want You,” it is clear that, stylistically, this record is miles away from both Sinatra’s take on the standards and Dylan’s own recent work. The ten songs of “Shadows in the Night” are stripped-down and introspective, featuring five-piece arrangements of pedal steel and muted brass in place of the impassioned strings of Sinatra’s big bands. Dylan’s vocals, too, are unexpectedly tender. Gone are the guttural sneer of 2012’s “Tempest” and the madcap mutterings of 2009’s oddball “Christmas in the Heart.” Here, the corrosion on Dylan’s voice allows him to probe the emotional depths of his lyrics without collapsing into sentimentality.
This winning mixture of understated instrumentation and damaged yet soulful vocals ebbs and flows gently throughout “Shadows in the Night.” Percussion is sparse or absent. “What’ll I Do,” for example, relies on alternating lines of plodding bass and swirling pedal steel to establish the rhythm. The brass is similarly spare, to profound effect: a chorus of trumpets give a sacred air to “That Lucky Old Sun,” the album’s closing track, without ever leaving the
background of the soundscape.
Dylan’s trademark wit isn’t absent either, although its ordinarily caustic edge here mellows into gentle self-deprecation. The decision to lead off with “I’m a Fool to Want You,” for example, sneakily acknowledges the cloud of dread which surrounded the announcement that Dylan was tackling Sinatra — while allowing the song’s own beauty to answer those concerns.
For the great jazz and swing singers of the mid-20th century — Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole — the standards were first and foremost sonic templates for showcasing their musical talent. By stripping these century-old songs down to their essences, Dylan has allowed them to stand out not as vehicles for his own creative genius, but simply as truly powerful songs in their own right. Rid of the dated baggage of the big-band sound (a sound Dylan himself helped to eradicate in his early years), these songs sound truly timeless.
“Shadows in the Night” is certainly not the most ambitious or groundbreaking project of Dylan’s career. The range of emotions present here pales in comparison to that of works like “Blonde on Blonde,” “Blood on the Tracks,” or even “Tempest.” But personal genius need not, and ought not, saturate every work of art. By allowing himself to fade to the background, Dylan, one of the last paragons of a bygone generation of artists, has uncovered for us the greatest hits of an era that was old when he was young. In his loving hands, they have become again new.
