Bob Dylan - Triplicate

The Guardian 100

With his third album of covers, Dylan is a dependable connoisseur, whose choices illuminate his own compositions
(Columbia)

With his third album of covers in a row – this one a 30-song extravaganza of old favourites such as Sentimental Journey, As Time Goes By and Stormy Weather – the casual observer might assume that Bob Dylan is subjecting his long-suffering fans’ forbearance to its most stringent test since 2009’s Christmas album. But on Triplicate – as it was with Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels – his singing is sensitive and the exquisite arrangements avoid Rat-Pack brashness and cloying sentimentality. Dylan is a prism through which American music is revealed in new and fascinating ways. From his interpretations of folk and blues songs in the 60s to his Theme Time Radio Hour show in the 00s, he is a dependable connoisseur whose choices illuminate his own compositions. As Dylan points out in a remarkable interview on his website, none of these songs were originally recorded by their composers. Though all but one (Beggin’) were recorded by Frank Sinatra, Dylan is unintimidated by their pedigree.

Drowned In Sound 80

While Dylan’s voice has undoubtedly transformed over the years into sort of a hoarse growl, the songs on Triplicate are not only notable for how he elevates his crooning chops but also the backing musicians buttressing his reach. The first disc follows the formula laid down by 2015's Shadows in the Night, with Dylan revisiting 'I Guess I Have To Change My Plan', made famous by Frank Sinatra, a short blusey jaunt that includes a golden horn section, paving the way for Dylan’s scratchy vocals. Although there was nothing to hint at it in his younger years, an older Dylan seems quite infatuated with the Sinatra ambiance, and he puts his original spin on these standards. He seems quite impassioned on 'This Nearly Was Mine', stretching his voice to describe a high potential relationship gone wrong. In its bare iteration, there is barely a sound other than Dylan singing on the wistful track and the song is made all the better for it..

Often during Triplicate, it’s immensely impressive how Dylan balances the old world of the songs he harkens back to while lacing them with a palpable modern feel. The songs here truly transport listeners to a different time of musty, smoke-filled jazz bars while simultaneously grounding them in the present. The prestigious aspect about each of the songs on the album is how gleeful Dylan seems to be when singing them, as if if he is a child reciting songs that he has memorised by heart on the radio.. Disc two begins with 'Braggie', where a swirl of circus-like instrumentation ushers in a coy Dylan. He pays necessary tribute to the fun-loving atmosphere of the song, wafting through the tune with a bombastic set of vocals which proves gratifying over the piano and horn sections. With 'As Time Goes By', Dylan slows things down with a plodding sonic palette, where he plays the role of a big band leader from another era but strangely implanted in the goings-on of today.

For a man that has virtually had tons of his original songs reimagined, Dylan is quite up to the task of reinventing these pop standards with his much celebrated, inventive mind. His scratchy singing lends itself well 'The Best Is Yet To Come', where a hopeful Dylan sings of a day when his lover will recognise his seductive charms as something worthwhile. Although he has done it in fits and starts during his lengthy career, it can be sort of jarring to hear Dylan croon over lyrics that lack the vitality of his self-written recordings, but it is a joyful excursion considering how grateful Dylan sounds on each record. From Disc three, the wavy 'Sentimental Journey' is right up his alley, and he captures the nostalgic ambience of the song, uttering each word with an intensity that makes the listener feel as if they are witnessing Dylan speak about his own life. He sounds even more forceful on 'When The World Was Young', as if he no longer merely covering a song but living through it vicariously. There is a forlorn essence here, and Dylan’s vocals make it so that he seems to speak directly to object the song with unguarded emotion. He seems to pine for a time when the world was not disturbed with abstract cluttering or unnecessary noise - a day one can imagine even before he was born. Dylan has always abounded in myth, and most of the songs of Triplicate find him yearning for an era he never got to experience first-hand.

While Dylan fans surely miss his original tunes, this honest, affecting tribute to a bygone era of music is a treat in itself. It’s no secret that Dylan has hit on another golden period of creativity in his old age, but his covering of traditional pop standards is innovative in its own fashion. Like his release of John Wesley Harding, or his transition to Christianity, or his Traveling Wilburys phase, no one can predict what the mysterious Dylan will decide to dedicate his time to in the future. But for now, it seems that Dylan desires to put the pen down and explore the somewhat forgotten gems of the past and add new meaning to them.

The Guardian 80

(Columbia)

The 38th album from the only Nobel prize winner (to date) to have appeared in a Victoria’s Secret ad finds him continuing his reinterpretations of the classic American songbook, as he did so successfully on 2015’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. Spread across three loosely themed discs, Dylan performs intimate versions of songs written by Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin and others and, in the main, popularised by Sinatra. Throughout, the muted arrangements act as foils to the expressiveness of his pathos-imbued croon, turning the limitations of his voice to his advantage. It’s a wisely curated selection – despite these not being Dylan’s lyrics, it’s impossible to listen to the likes of September of My Years and not hear the resonance of autobiography.

Pitchfork 65

Bob Dylan’s Triplicate is the third album of American standards that Bob Dylan has released in the past two years. It is also three albums long, with 10 songs on each album, for a total runtime of 95 minutes. Dylan, a songwriter whose most enigmatic refrain is that he is less complicated than everyone makes him out to be, has explained that 10 is the number of completion, a lucky number, “symbolic of light.”

In any case, the project brings the total number of hours of Bob Dylan singing American standards to just under three. Like Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, Triplicate leans most heavily on material associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer with whom Dylan has nothing obvious in common other than that fame turned both men into myths. Some of the songs here—“Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” “Stardust”—are well known, at least to the vanishing population of those who care. Most were written in the misty and unremembered days when the singer still went by Robert Zimmerman, a period on which Dylan has staked his entire career.

The arrangements are polished and controlled: guitar, bass, brushed snare drum, the occasional weep of steel guitar. Dylan’s voice is not, and has not been for nearly 50 years, but coming to a Bob Dylan album for vocals is like going to the state fair for the food: Let’s hope you like it fried. In the absence of a crooner’s virtuosity and polish, there’s character, that great unteachable quality that makes even the marginal doodles of a genius flicker with life. Dylan’s voice—gutted but charming, a ghost banging around in the closet looking for a lightswitch—sounds best on the album’s mid- and uptempo songs, where it carries wisdom and resilience and light, imbuing received wisdom with the bittersweetness of lived experience.

The ballads, beautiful as they are, sometimes feel static, bereft of that innerverse opened by singers like Johnny Hartman or, say, Willie Nelson, whose own standards album Stardust remains a high point for projects like this. There seems to be a tempo threshold below which the songs on Triplicate become quicksand for Dylan, turning him from an old scamp into a confused puddle of remorse. Call it the difference between just enough and one too many. (At least he’s not maudlin, the cliff over which all ballads peer.) The exceptions—“There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” “But Beautiful”—tend to be songs whose lyrics offer their singers an opportunity to be funny, a quality Dylan continues to not get enough credit for.

In either case, the gambit—and this has always been Dylan’s gambit as a vocalist—is not to sing well, but to sing appropriately. For the same reasons you wouldn’t cast a 7-year-old as someone’s grandmother, it’s tough to sell “Here’s That Rainy Day” when sung by a singer who sounds like they’ve always stayed dry.

Traditionally, an album like Triplicate would have been a way for a performer to showcase their interpretive powers, the relic of a time when songwriting was consolidated in office buildings and movie studios and popular art was understood—without handicap—to be the product of the division of labor: Some write, some produce, some play, some sing.

The irony is that this is a tradition Dylan helped to destroy. “Tin Pan Alley is gone,” he wrote in 1985, referring to a metonym for the songwriting industry during the 1930s and ’40s. “I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.”

Can and do are different things. We still have our superproducers, our backdoor deliveries, the shapes moving behind the curtains. We also still have our “bad” singers, many of whom are the most interesting vocalists around: Young Thug, Bill Callahan. Things—as the durability of the sentiments behind these songs show—don’t change all that much. Still, 95 minutes is a long time.

Let’s say we take Triplicate at face value. What do we have? A good-natured investigation into the Great American Songbook that allows a wealthy eccentric to stroll, publicly, through the annals of his own mind. One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal. There is something ridiculous about it, something enigmatic, something that glitters with the transcendence of a weird idea brought to stubborn fruition. Something Dylanesque.