http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wir ... n-26836552
'New Basement Tapes' Band Takes on Dylan
NEW YORK — Nov 11, 2014, 12:25 PM ET
By DAVID BAUDER AP Television Writer
This Nov. 9, 2014 photo shows, from left, Jim James, Rhiannon Giddens, Marcus Mumford, Taylor Goldsmith and Elvis Costello posing in in New York in promotion of "Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes," an album produced by T Bone Burnett and created by the musicians using lyrics written by Bob Dylan for the legendary "basement tapes" recordings. (Photo by Drew Gurian/Invision/AP)
The unexpected package from Bob Dylan's song publisher promised an adventure for music producer T Bone Burnett.
It was a collection of typed lyrics written — and forgotten — by Dylan during his fertile "Basement Tapes" period in the late 1960s. The instructions were minimal: do with this what you will. This week, everyone can hear what Burnett did.
He booked a studio for two weeks and invited an insta-band of talented friends to transform the words into music. Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons), Jim James (My Morning Jacket) and Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops) answered the call and, at Mumford's suggestion, Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) was invited, too.
Nobody involved — even Burnett, an old friend — has spoken to Dylan about what they've done with his songs.
"We aren't looking for any kind of blessing," Mumford said. "It would be cool if he likes it, but in a way, he's like everybody else now. He'll hear it in the same light as everyone else."
Burnett purposely gave the participants about as much instruction as he'd gotten, sending them the lyrics and a start date. Most arrived with several written arrangements, with the exception of Mumford, who thought collaborating would be done on the spot.
It was an intimidating assignment. Giddens, for one, wondered if she'd pull her weight with more famous colleagues.
"You'd be a fool or an arrogant person if you don't say initially, of course it's daunting," Costello said. "But then were you daunted in the sense that you were frozen? No. How did we cut 44 songs in 12 days? In order to do that, you need the skill to prepare and the ability to recognize the moment."
Burnett sought to keep people comfortable. In a film about the project that debuts on Showtime at 9 p.m. EST Nov. 21, he's depicted as a kindly coach, offering quiet advice and a smile. He kept everyone moving: one or two takes, and it was time to try something new.
Chosen in part for their versatility, the musicians shuffled from instrument to instrument. Drumsticks for one song, guitar for another. Lead vocal on the music they composed, backup on others. Who has time to learn an arrangement? Just keep going.
"I'd never felt more creative," Goldsmith said, "and I've never felt less comfortable."
The musicians tried to be inspired by the spirit of the original Basement Tapes, when Dylan woodshedded in upstate New York with The Band, making music with no expectations people would hear it. A five-disc box of those old sessions is on sale this fall.
The big difference is they knew, this time, that many fans would be keenly interested in what they were doing.
"We were trying to make a great noise together," Mumford said. "We weren't worried about how people would respond to it, how people would like it. There were enough of us in the room and we trusted each others' tastes enough to know, well, if we all like it, somebody else in the world is going to like it."
The sessions were, as Giddens put it, a master class in songwriting and illustration of the malleability of songs. The group recorded four different versions of "Hidee Hidee Ho" and the title cut, "Lost on the River." Two of each are on the 20-song disc released Tuesday.
"What is a song?" James said. "Why does one person's brain see one set of lyrics and it's a bashing rocker, and another person sees the same lyrics and it's calm and tranquil?"
It's not like no one has ever tried to replicate the atmosphere of the Basement Tapes. The veteran Costello knows that it doesn't always work, and credits Burnett for fostering a sense that the musicians couldn't fail if they let themselves go.
They're already anticipating another project.
"I like Jim's idea," Costello joked. "Write new music for 'Blowin' in the Wind' and songs like that."
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/199 ... ent-tapes/
Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes
Harvest / Electromagnetic; 2014
By Douglas Wolk; November 11, 2014
6.1
It's a little wearying that Bob Dylan's burst of creativity in the spring and summer of 1967 is still getting tapped; it would be nice if, for instance, a single artist had had a moment within the past couple of decades that was both as musically fertile and as exhaustively catalogued, mythologized and picked over. But there The Basement Tapes are—an ever-brighter star in the Boomer firmament—and here we are, as their glow increases from a distance of 47 years.
The six-disc Basement Tapes Complete set that Dylan released last week isn't even the whole story. At some point in the past couple of years, Dylan found a stash or two of lyrics from the Basement Tapes period that he apparently didn't get around to setting to music at the time (or, if he did, apparently didn't bother to play with the Band at Big Pink). Producer T-Bone Burnett was appointed to do something with them, and assembled a kind of new Traveling Wilburys to write and perform music for them: Elvis Costello, Jim James, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes.
This isn't the first time somebody else has written music for Dylan's words—the first example may have been Ben Carruthers and the Deep's 1965 single "Jack o' Diamonds"—and two of the original Basement Tapes' highlights, "This Wheel's on Fire" and "Tears of Rage", were completed by members of the Band. Dylan himself participated in a similar project three years ago, completing Hank Williams' unfinished lyric to "The Love That Faded" for The Lost Notebooks. Williams, though, didn't live to finish that album's songs. Dylan's just not so much the guy who wrote the lyrics on Lost on the River any more. (He's moved on: the set list on his current tour includes only four of his pre-1997 songs, not counting a Frank Sinatra cover.)
These Dylan texts are, literally, throwaways, but they come from a period when he was writing spectacular throwaways. The baffled breakup songs "Golden Tom - Silver Judas" and "Kansas City" would both be as perpetually quoted as, say, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" if they'd appeared on record in the '60s. (The latter features some perfect Dylanoid backhands a la "Positively 4th Street": "You invite me into your house/ And then you say you gotta pay for what you break!") And, as always, Bob's a magpie: the title of "Duncan and Jimmy" riffs on the folk tune "Duncan and Brady", and "Hidee Hidee Ho" owes its hook to Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher".
A project like this is a treacherous one for its artists, though. To try to sound like Dylan is to come up short of the mark, and to try to not sound like Dylan can betray the material. So the New Basement Tapes hedged their bets, each writing music for the old lyrics on their own, which is why the 20 tracks here (on the "deluxe" edition, released at the same time as an impoverished 15-track version) include a few lyrics that show up twice in radically different settings. Most of the songwriters err on the side of avoiding Dylanish cadences—Goldsmith's settings, in particular, are bland adult-contemporary stuff, and his lack of puckishness means that when he gets to a phrase like "I have paid that awful price," it lands with a dull clunk.
It also seems like a mistake to take these songs as seriously as the NBT's sometimes do. "Spanish Mary", for instance, is a chain of stock phrases from old ballads, shuffled until sense falls away from them ("in Kingston town of high degree"?), but Giddens sings it as if it's a meaningfully dramatic narrative. (To be fair, the funereal Giddens/Mumford setting of "Lost on the River" that closes the album is one of its high points.)
The MVP of this group turns out to be Elvis Costello, who treats Bob as a band member who didn't happen to show up to the jam that day. Costello's already started playing a few of his collaborations with 26-year-old Dylan live, including "Matthew Met Mary", which isn't even on this album. His two-minute take on "Married to My Hack", whose lyric is basically just Dylan flexing his rhyme chops, is a rapid-fire monotone rant in the vein of "Subterranean Homesick Blues"; he bellows and snarls his way through "Six Months in Kansas City" as if it was one of his own minor rockers.
Nearly every track on Lost on the River has a couple of memorable moments: a marvelous turn of phrase, a brief Jim James guitar meltdown, an instant of the band members discovering how their voices can harmonize. But what it lacks is the casual joy of Dylan's Basement Tapes—music that was made almost literally in a woodshed, with no thought at the time to releasing it. Dylan and the Band had the luxury of freedom from expectations and the luxury of being allowed to make something trivial. For all its power and commitment, Burnett's supergroup doesn't.