I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Tempest (the iTunes version until my LPs arrive) over the past week and I’ve also been looking at some of the reviews. My impression at the moment is of a vast gulf between what the album contains versus what even the best reviewers have been able to say about it. I don’t think this is because the reviewers are stupid but rather that there really is so much going on in the songs on this album that a review of standard length and breadth is bound to come up short; this is true I think even more than to the usual degree. I mean, it’s always essentially impossible to write adequately about music, when only listening to it will communicate its nature, but Tempest is a special case, even when compared to many other Bob Dylan albums. I think we’re used to a Bob Dylan album having one or two or even three of the kinds of songs that blow one’s mind and take over one’s imagination. But Tempest, with ten songs, has I think at least eight that reach that level (though I’m not even going to say which two don’t).

On one level perhaps it’s just a question of fecundity. The album is highly populated with long songs, and even the songs that aren’t dramatically long contain lots and lots of words. Dylan’s never been one to record many instrumentals, but I think it’s been a long time since the lyrics have spilled out of him with this kind of volume and force. And not chaotically either: the lyrics are intricate and filled with terrific rhymes, and burst forth in his torn-up voice yet highly nuanced singing with confidence and purpose.

Now, I fully understand why all the people invited to those “listening sessions” earlier in the year were so wowed. An appreciative listener arrives at the end of this album somewhat breathless and slack-jawed in amazement (and not just on the first spin either).

Of-course, all of the above makes me sound like someone who worships everything Dylan does completely uncritically, but I’m long past apologizing for my affection and regard for Bob Dylan’s body of work. Check back in three hundred years and we’ll find out whether those who thought Dylan was very special have been vindicated or whether those who thought he was merely another purveyor of late-20th-century-type rock/pop songs were proven right.

It’s true that not everyone has been bowled over by Tempest. That’s fair enough—no one’s obliged to like it at all—but merely as a student of human nature I’m curious as to why some people who like what we can loosely call “this kind of music” and who attest to loving much of what Bob Dylan has done before would not be nearly as wildly-enamored of this album as others.

The review in the LA Times was not technically a bad review (3 stars), but included substantial caveats. Perhaps reflecting on some of the reservations can be illustrative of where the differences in perception lie.

The reviewer appears to be least-impressed by the title track, which is a fourteen-minute song based around the sinking of the Titanic.

[Bob Dylan] is officially an antique, a relic and the last of his kind in a world that has little time or patience to focus on a 14-minute song about the sinking of the Titanic when everybody already knows how it ends. This is the big, grand miscue on the record. In an Irish-tinged tune that repeats virtually the same 16-bar melody throughout its quarter-hour, Dylan in poetic verse recounts the sinking and the fate of its passengers with a singsong phrasing that grows tiresome.

Well, if “everybody already knows how it ends,” what is the point, indeed?

It’s not beyond the capacity of Bob Dylan to write and record a dull or monotonous track, but I admit it does beggar my own empathetic capacity to understand how someone who generally enjoys Dylan’s music could find this to be such a track. It requires some kind of imperviousness. The folky melody is certainly repetitive, but if you want symphonies, you’re in the wrong place, my friend. For me, the counterpoint of the lilting waltz with the subject matter of the song amounts to something very affecting. And Bob’s singing throughout is so filled with variations in tone and character that monotony is for me very far from the situation. Dylan is really proving on this album how someone with a voice that is so shot can nonetheless be a a singer of great expression and subtlety (at least in the studio).

Ah, but we know how the story ends! Well, to think that this song is intended to inform us of how the story of the Titanic ends strikes me as maybe a slight failure of imagination, or attentiveness, or both. The title of the song, “Tempest,” is the initial tip-off that we are not in literal-ville. The historical Titanic was not sunk in a storm, after all, but by an iceberg (of which there is not a single mention in the forty-five[?] verses). So one might begin to suspect there could be something metaphorical going on. How about the story of the Titanic as a metaphor for life and death—for all of our lives and deaths? In any case, for this longstanding fan of Dylan’s work, it is pretty darned difficult not to be galvanized by the driving parade of verses, some of which include:

The passageway was narrow
There was blackness in the air
He saw every kind of sorrow
Heard voices everywhere

The watchman he lay dreaming
The damage had been done
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
And he tried to tell someone

Ah, shucks, if only we didn’t know how it all ends! Oddly enough, despite knowing it all, I find myself coming to the end of this song only wide-eyed and dazed.

Literal-ville doesn’t seem to me like it would be the most interesting place to live, especially if all you’ve got to listen to are Bob Dylan songs. The same LA Times reviewer says he likes the song “Long and Wasted Years,” but sums it up blandly as “a bitter song about a dead marriage.” Oh! I hadn’t realized that’s all it was. Foolishly, I’d felt all kinds of deep vibrations and resonances in this song. But somehow, there must be a way to bang all those verses into shape as just another bitter song about a dead marriage.

My enemy crashed into the dust
Stopped dead in his tracks and he lost his lust
He was run down hard and he broke apart
He died in shame, he had an iron heart

We cried on a cold and frosty morn
We cried because our souls were torn
So much for tears
So much for these long and wasted years

Hmm. If I didn’t know it was only a bitter song about a dead marriage, I’d say the track fairly explodes with emotional echoes and reflections on things like love, loyalty, memory, forgiveness, and regret. In addition, in terms of the sound and vocal performance, it evokes Dylan’s great song from 1986, “Brownsville Girl,” suggesting however vaguely some kind of picking-up of that story many years later. I admit that the track downright makes my eyes well up from the very first verse onwards. Maybe I’ll be able to correct that by keeping in mind the words “bitter” and “dead” from now on (but I wouldn’t count on it).

The same reviewer helpfully points out that the song “Early Roman Kings” is “a blues that directs its wrath at the selfish rich in the same way that ‘Masters of War’ indicted the military-industrial complex in 1963.” Alright. Without reopening stale discussions of “Masters of War,” is slamming the selfish rich—like some “Occupy Wall Street” slogan—really what “Early Roman Kings” is all about?

I can dress up your wounds
With a blood-clotted rag
I ain’t afraid to make love
To a bitch or a hag

I ain’t dead yet
My bell still rings
I keep my fingers crossed
Like them early Roman kings

The LA Times reviewer appears to be way more savvy than yours truly, when it comes to hammering the latest Bob Dylan songs into some pre-ordained mold of meaning. For me, up until this point, I was just digging the attitude on this track. I hadn’t picked up on any political or social manifesto. I’ll keep trying, though. Continue reading Tempest by Bob Dylan: Is it an unreviewable album? →