u/BillNyeTheVinylGuy

People do not appreciate how “lived-in” Dylan’s interpretation of these songs are. They really are special, distinct versions of these classics. I really believe the words coming out of Dylan, like he wouldn’t have sung them at his age if he didn’t know exactly what they were talking about. Nothing will ever make me forget how special the first listen of Shadows was. That refined version of his voice came out of nowhere and was such a pleasant surprise (don’t think anyone thought it was coming back after Christmas in the Heart…)

Anyway, here’s a great summation of this period from a recent substack article:

““I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way,” he wrote in the press release for Shadows in the Night. “They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter of fact. What me and my band are doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.” To do this, instead of attempting to replicate the lush orchestration of the 1950s, as most standards revival records had done, he stripped them down to their essence, just his voice accompanied by upright bass, pedal steel, and occasional flourishes of guitar, horns, and percussion, halfway between a sophisticated jazz trio and a particularly melancholy honky-tonk country outfit. He gave his beautiful arrangements their due space, often letting the introduction ride for a long while before he started to sing. He found that, just as old age gave a gravitas and meaning to the “traditional people” he watched in New York and at the Newport Folk Festival, it gave a sense of deep weight to these seemingly-ephemeral songs. Initially, there is something comical in listening to his gnarled voice perform these songs; play his version of “Some Enchanted Evening” to an unsuspecting listener and you’re sure to get a burst of surprised laughter when his vocal comes in. Yet sit with them and you begin to realize that there is a pathos that could only come from someone whose voice is so weathered, who has experienced so much of life, when he sings:

>Love is funny or it's sad
Or it's quiet or it's mad
It's a good thing or it's bad
But beautiful

Or, in “Why Try to Change Me Now?,” a composition from 1952 that seems to have been written especially for an aged and reflective Dylan:

>Why can't I be more conventional?
People talk, people stare, so I try
But that's not for me 'cause I can't see
My kind of crazy world go passing me by

He used the contours of the standards, the education they offered in melody, phrasing, and timing, to retrain his voice, which years of touring had degenerated into a rough bark. Non-fans may laugh at the idea that Dylan’s late-career singing, an acquired taste if ever there was one, went through better and worse periods, but compare his voice now to that of live recordings from the early 2010s (when I first saw him in concert and dismissed him as well and truly over the hill) and you’ll find that he no longer sounds as if he has a Texas-sized frog in his throat. He is, post-standards albums, capable of a much greater delicacy, a strange kind of ragged beauty.“

First off, the band sounds great here.

Second, I don't know if I've ever heard any live record where the lead singer drops so many F-bombs lol