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With the official release of Tempest by Bob Dylan coming in seven days, the full-length reviews are beginning to appear in the press. People appear to like it a lot. I can’t be sure, but I’m beginning to suspect that this might be the break-out album for Bob Dylan—the one that makes him a household name.
On the other hand, maybe not. If it flops, I guess he’ll have to just go back to writing songs for Adele and Tom Jones.
Joking aside, just as with the “preview” reviews, one can very quickly read too much of the “real” reviews, and so I’ve really only been glancing. Like most mortals, I’m looking forward to hearing the record(s) completely myself, and I suppose I’ll get round to writing something about it here afterwards.
The promotion for it has been quite something. From the “listening locations” where even now one can hear tracks streamed to one’s “device,” to the “pop-up stores” where one will be able to go on the evening before the release to buy it early … and all of this began with those “listening sessions” for select members of the intelligentsia, who were all blown away. In total it amounts to a perfect storm. Put another way, an ideal tempest.
It’s amazing to contemplate. If you’d told someone back in 1970 that forty-two years hence the release of a new Bob Dylan album would be such a huge occasion, they’d have thought you were smoking something rare and potent indeed. After Self Portrait? How much could the guy possibly have left in him? Even New Morning seemed no more than a half-way return-to-form to most people. No one could have conceived that in the year 2012 Bob Dylan would actually be one of the the surest bets in the world of popular music. Because as strange as it sounds, that’s what he is today. But the thing to celebrate is that he’s done it on his own terms. He’s being who he is. People just happen to like it. Continue reading “Tempest approaching for Bob Dylan fans, and a still-curious world”
The official word on the forthcoming Bob Dylan album, titled 
has come via a