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James Taylor
This Is the Life
Amy McDonald
Live in Gdansk
No Bull (Live in Madrid, Spain 1996)
What Happened?
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Nine Lives
Steve Winwood
Moneyland
Various Artists
I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)
Various Artists
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Toby Keith's 35 BIGGEST Hits
Toby Keith
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Various Artists
As I look through my i-tunes collection, I realize that I already have six versions of “Highway 61 Revisited” saved digitally on my computer. A few are various Dylan recordings and the remainder are covers by other artists. I have eight versions of “All Along the Watchtower,” nine versions of “Just Like a Woman,” and over a dozen renderings of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” All of this overkill begs the question; Does the world need another album of artists covering Bob Dylan songs? The simple answer is ‘Of course not”, but the soundtrack for “I’m Not There” is not quite so simple.
Over the course of two disks, thirty-four recordings by almost as many artists veer wildly all over place. Some are faithful to the original recordings, while others are incredibly imaginative recreations. For my money, it’s the reinvented tracks that may help this collection become something more than a novelty. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how many of the most iconoclastic artists are the very ones who play it safest. Eddie Vedder sounds great on “All Along the Watchtower,” but he does nothing that hasn’t been done hundreds of times before. Cat Power and Karen O created virtual carbon copies of Dylan’s own recordings, leaving me to wonder why they would even bother, since any cover band could have done the same thing. Even Jeff Tweedy disappointed, with a true-to-form but straightforward reading of “A Simple Twist of Fate.”
The most successful stuff here are the acts who chose obscure material, or have rendered the song into something new and interesting in its own right. The Los Lobos version of “Billy 1” is totally cool, and casts an obscure gem in an entirely new light. Iron and Wine teamed up with Calexico to create as moody an interpretation of “Dark Eyes” as I could imagine. You’ll have to listen twice before you even recognize it. I also have to give props to Yo La Tengo – a band that usually does not impress me much – for choosing “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” This may the hardest-rocking song this band has ever stumbled upon. I don’t even know where Stephen Malkmus found “Can’t Leave Her Behind,” but I’m glad he did, while Sufjan Stevens turns “Ring Them Bells” into a Van Dyke Parks-style show tune.
I guess everybody will read this collection in their own way, but I doubt that anyone would consider it to be indispensable. As for myself, I intend to load a dozen or so tracks into my i-tunes, but I’ll skip the recordings that bring nothing new to the table.
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