"Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody when I paint my masterpiece"
Reviewing Shadow Kingdom by Bob Dylan
One of the by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and most of 2021 was the prevalence of concerts and other musical performances one could watch from home that they would, under normal circumstances, have to go out to the theater or concert hall or arena to see.
One in those string of performances was Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom, which would feature songs from “the early part” of Dylan’s career (that early part including songs from 1989’s Oh Mercy, which really makes you grasp how lengthy Dylan’s career has been).
It was not a “traditional” concert film, almost more like a film that features Dylan along with his band (including members of the band Big Thief) playing in a locale right out of a film noir that was very in keeping with Dylan’s aesthetic.
Nearly 2 years later, that show has been released as a standalone album featuring 13 songs ranging from the ultra-canonical to the slightly more obscure (at least to the general listener, the hardcore and even moderately hardcore Dylan fan is up on just about all these songs).
You have those touchstone Dylan songs being performed along with “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and album tracks from John Wesley Harding and the aforementioned Oh Mercy. It’s not what you’d expect from a performer doing this kind of thing, but that means it’s exactly what you should have expected knowing it was Bob Dylan.
Shadow Kingdom occupies a strange space within Dylan’s discography. It’s not really a “live” album, but it’s also not a proper studio release. It’s not an album of new songs, like Rough and Rowdy Ways, but the songs (as I’ll talk a little bit more about) seem “new” or different in a major way. This makes it difficult, in my mind at least, to assess.
We often talk about Dylan’s reinvention of himself and the different phases of his career. But what Shadow Kingdom highlights is how he can so profoundly reinvent and reimagine his own songs from the past and make them fit into whatever is sound is at the given moment.. It’s remarkable in a way to hear songs that were defined by their electric rock-and-roll-ness work perfectly in this more acoustic setting. There are no drums or electric instruments to be heard.
"Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” and “Pledging My Time” (just to name a few) are songs so closely linked to Dylan’s “going electric” period, and yet they still work and sound great amidst these acoustic instruments and New Orleans-inflected accordion sound.
In addition to saying something about Dylan as a musical genius, I think this tells us that these songs are in a folk tradition and thus will live on beyond Dylan’s own performance of them. They are not dependent upon the context of their recording to have meaning or weight. Dylan has helped to create this new American songbook, and Shadow Kingdom as an artifact establishes that in our minds.
I also enjoyed hearing a song like “Watching the River Flow” getting a chance to shine and be performed. It’s a song that was only released as a single and as part of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2, meaning that it could easily be overlooked or under appreciated. Here’s the studio version
And here’s the version from Shadow Kingdom.
The highlights, for me, are the performances of “Queen Jane Approximately,” “Forever Young,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The way in which Dylan is able to perform “Queen Jane” in a radically different way from its original version and yet retain so much from that original version is really stunning. “Baby Blue” is one of the greatest songs Dylan ever wrote, so that’s one that will almost always be a favorite when it’s performed. “Forever Young” is an example of how this stripped down, acoustic setting can take a song that I’m pretty lukewarm on and make me love it.
I went into this somewhat skeptically, and I definitely wondered if this was something I would need or that could stand on its own after the moment of that live-streamed concert film when that was going to be the only way we could see Dylan perform. Did we need this? Would it be worth it?
After listening to Shadow Kingdom, and appreciating the sonic reinvention of these classic songs, I arrived at the conclusion that yes this is something that we need and can stand on its own. I started thinking about a somewhat similar recent project, U2’s Songs of Surrender, and this notion of taking songs out of a recording artist’s past and remaking or reimagine them. With popular music (and I’m using popular in the broadest sense possible—not jazz or classical), we tend to not think of these songs as being “alive.” They become calcified in their recorded versions and cannot be reimagined. I think what artists like U2 and Bruce Springsteen (with Springsteen on Broadway) and Bob Dylan (to highlight just a few) do is to show us that these songs can change and grow and stand to be reconstituted on a record.
Shadow Kingdom is definitely not for the person looking to get into Bob Dylan. But if you have even a slight familiarity with Dylan’s recorded history, then Shadow Kingdom is a rewarding way to engage with songs you know in a new sonic way.