Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Bob Dylan

Showing posts with label Bob Dylan. Show all posts

October 13, 2016

Bob Dylan Wins The Nobel Prize In Literature

Finally! So how does it feel,Bob?

Bob Dylan has been named the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature in a stunning announcement that for the first time bestowed the prestigious award to someone primarily seen as a musician.

The Swedish Academy cited the American musician for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Dylan had been mentioned in the Nobel speculation for years, but few experts expected the academy to extend the prestigious award to a genre such as pop music.
The literature award was the last of this year’s Nobel Prizes to be announced.

The six awards will be handed out on December 10th, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

With many thanks to The Australian

Could some of these be next?

Pictures from The Australian

Banquet speech by Bob Dylan given by the United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2016.

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming.

From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read.

When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things:

"Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.
My best wishes to you all,
Bob Dylan
Source: Nobel Prize.org

Bob Dylan finally responds to his award.

Rick Nelson - Some Words of Wisdom

'American Pie' Lyrics Sell For $1.2 million In New York

Bob Dylan Named Greatest Songwriter Ahead Of Lennon and McCartney According To Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan: His Website Let's You Direct His First Interactive Music Video

Bob Dylan Turns 73, 8 Fun Facts About Dylan

Arthur Alexander: The Forgotten Songwriter Who Inspired The Beatles, Bob Dylan

Scribbled Draft Lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” Sells for Record $2 Million

Bob Dylan Is Eminently Worthy Of The Nobel Prize In Literature

The Traveling Wilburys: Their History

Bob Dylan Named Greatest Songwriter Ahead Of Lennon and McCartney According To Rolling Stone

The Strange, but Mostly True, Story of Laurel Canyon: Gram Parsons And Jim Morrison

Traveling Wilburys To Travel Into New Territory - Streaming

The Traveling Wilburys: Their History

Bob Dylan's Sinatra-inspired 'Fallen Angels' Is Another Musical Triumph

Bob Dylan Releases A Night They Called It A Day Video

Frank Sinatra: 100 Years of Great Music - December 12th

The Nobel Prizes In Numbers

Literature:

Winnie The Pooh Named Kids' Favourite Book
'The Great Gatsby': Seven Life Lessons
Charles Dickens: Literary Legend
Spain Finds Don Quixote Writer Cervantes' Tomb In Madrid
Where Do Fairy Tales Come From?
The Top 10 Shakespeare Scenes
The Best and Worst of Hollywood's Book Adaptations?
Is This Pasted Note Jane Austen's Final Missive?
Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hero Still Going Strong
Alice in Wonderland at 150
Father Of Anne Frank Listed As Co-Author Of Diary To Extend Copyright
Sir John Monash: Grantlee Kieza’s Biography
Julia Child’s French Cooking Book Was A Trail Blazer
Fairy Tales Are Grim!
Diggers discover Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess’, Martha Brown
Ben-Hur: A Remake On The Way
The Battle Over Troy
Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting
Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" Remade Again
Maggie Smith: Michael Coveney’s Biography
The Book Of Kells: A Medieval Treasure
Mysterious 'Man in the Iron Mask' Revealed
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Press Pass for the Spanish Civil War Found
Palace Found At Tintagel, Fabled Birthplace Of King Arthur
Who Was Cleopatra?
The Untold Truth About The Holy Grail

May 22, 2016

Bob Dylan's Sinatra-inspired 'Fallen Angels' Is Another Musical Triumph

Bob Dylan once again journeys back through the Great American Songbook for his spiritual sequel to 2015's Shadows In The Night, adding his brand of smoky crooning to some of the great mid-20th-century songs, most of which were popularized by Frank Sinatra, on his 37th studio album, Fallen Angels.

This outing is a more subdued affair than the last - gone are the horns, heavy are the steel guitars - but just as affecting. Though Dylan's band is as crisp as ever, it's his voice - yes, that voice - that's the highlight on the 12-track record.

Can Dylan sing? It depends on how you define that nebulous phrase. Does his voice have the warm, cool, masculinity of Sinatra? No (though it does have its own masculinity.) But does Dylan's smoky, surprisingly nimble, voice lend itself to songs about regret, longing and missed opportunity? Give the album a listen before you answer.

For Dylan, singing is like art. No one goes to museums and declares the most-detailed and best-drawn painting to be the best, then dismisses the scattered brushwork of Van Gogh or Monet and calls Picasso a hack because he can't seem to paint the human head. Art is allowed to have different styles.

Voices should too. No one is confusing Dylan's gravelly, lived-in voice with Sinatra's, which could carry across Hoboken all the way into Queens, but they share similarities - shifting from strong to vulnerable in the same verse, constructing lyrics for maximum effect and taking words written by someone else and making them his own. No once cares that when Sinatra was 35, it wasn't necessarily a very good year for blue-blooded girls of independent means; he made you believe it was.

Dylan might not be able to SING! (think Whitney Houston) but leave no doubt - he can sing. The small staccatos and drawn out syllables - the way he holds a word and draws out another when singing "some others I've seen, might never be mean" on It Had To Be You shows more range than most pop singers occupying the iTunes top 100.

You could have made it all the way through Shadows In The Night without humming a note you'd heard before. Dylan changes that at the start of Fallen Angels, opening the album with the popular standard Young At Heart and singing with some of the wry phrasing he's come to use in the past decades. Music fans will also know It Had To Be You and All The Way.

The wistfulness is still there, as it's been in all Dylan albums since after his comeback 1997 LP Time Out Of Mind. The way Dylan sings some lines you can practically see him winking, almost like he's enjoying the past that passed him by. In that way, the whole tenor of the album is like Dylan's late-career masterwork, Mississippi, which is ostensibly about the all-encompassing regret of lost love, but actually is sung with the idea that dreaming about what might have been is a better alternative than having actually found out. Sometimes the dreams are better than reality.

He sings on Melancholy Mood: "Deep in the night I search for a trace of a lingering kiss/a warm embrace/but love is a whimsy and flimsy as lace/and my arms embrace an empty space." Give that to Sinatra and it's a hurt that has never gone away. Dylan sings it like he's saying "shucks" and moving on.

The album gets rid of the brass used on SITN but keeps that organic, one-take feel. At various points you can hear Dylan inhale between notes, a pick hit the steel guitar and, depending on how hard you listen, possibly even some between-take chatter. As each song ends, there's some rather loud white noise, like you can hear smoke clouding the microphones. It's surely no mistake. Producer Jack Frost (Dylan himself) loves nothing more than a lived-in feel to his songs.

What about that title: Fallen Angels? Ever since it was announced, there's been debate about its meaning. Does it speak of the lost loves alluded to in the songs? Is it about Judy Garland, the muse of Johnny Mercer, who has two songs on the album? Is it a cypher, like when Dylan released Tempest in 2012, famously the name of Shakespeare's final work, and made fans think he was set to retire? (There's only one way Bob's retiring, by the way.) Or does the album refer to one of the most mysterious stories in Dylan lore?

A few years back, Dylan spoke about reading the autobiography of Sonny Barger, the founder of the notorious Oakland chapter of the Hell's Angels. In the book, Barger references the death of Bobby Zimmermann, a president in the early Angels who died in a motorcycle accident a few days before The New York Times reviewed Dylan's first album. Dylan, who was born Robert Zimmerman and had a devastating motorcycle accident in 1966, told Rolling Stone he believes there was some sort of transfiguration between himself and Bobby Zimmerman, the fallen angel.

Whatever it means, and whether Dylan was even serious or not with Rolling Stone, America's greatest artist and poet turns 75 just four days after the release of his latest album. And it's never been clearer that, even though he didn't sing this specific Sinatra classic on either of his throwback albums, Bob Dylan is, more than ever, doing it his way.

By Chris Chase
With many thanks to Fox Sports.

Frank Sinatra: 100 Years of Great Music - December 12th

How Los Angeles and Hollywood Took Rock ‘N’ Roll Around The World

Rock Around the Clock: B-side Find Accidentally Launched Rock Anthem

Bob Dylan Wins The Nobel Prize In Literature