Bob Dylan
New Morning

THE REVIEW

In 1970, New Morning was released, an album in many ways anti-Dylan, just as Self Portrait had been only four months earlier, a sensational failure from an artist who until then had almost never missed a beat.

This album, as I was saying, is anti-Dylan because it is neither folk, nor rock, nor blues, except in a few flashes: it was conceived as the soundtrack to Archibald MacLeish's theater comedy titled The devil and Daniel Webster. For this play, Dylan wrote New Morning, Time Passes Slowly, and Father of Night which represent the embryo of the album.

Time passes slowly is a good pop song, musically led by the piano with typically blues chords: the piano is the main instrument of this album, another uncommon feature for Dylan who plays it with great flair in all tracks.

"Time passes slowly and we try to stay right," almost a warning to the audience, after the many criticisms that had rained down on him from the previous Self Portrait:

Time passes slowly
up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead
and try so hard to stay right

New Morning is one of the few rock episodes of the album, it foreshadows in some ways some rock-gospel atmospheres of the conversion period, with a beautiful guitar solo and the tight rhythm of the drums: the lyrics are joyful, romantic, speaking of the joy of being still alive with the loved one next to you:

So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
On this new morning with you
New morning

Father of Night, a piano piece, tribal, at times dark, which led to a heavy quarrel between Dylan and MacLeish, according to whom the "father of the night" should have been the Devil. The author of the piece had instead identified God as the subject, also anticipating the Christian conversion period that would come about ten years later:

Father of day, Father of night, Father of black, Father of white

If Dogs Runs Free, is a Jazz piece, a beautiful and refined Jazz from another time, with two extraordinary guests, Al Kooper at the piano and Maeretha Stewart on backing vocals. Again, the theme is love, the tone is joyful, like the music that accompanies it:

If dogs run free, then what must be, Must be, and that is all

Winterlude is another delightful piano sketch, a bar piece, beautiful in its simplicity. Redone (one might say copied/plagiarized?) musically by Principe De Gregori who made a tremendous success of it with the title Buonanotte Fiorellino, while Dylan's much superior original remains a minor piece in his discography to this day.

Three Angels and The man in me are among Dylan's most beautiful, in my opinion, ballads: the first is a poignant and brief organ piece, the second a piano ballad with an almost reggae rhythm: a slowed-down reggae that ends up becoming a soul/rhythm and blues piece.

If not for you was the most successful song, and single, perhaps the weakest piece on the album, revisited a few years later by George Harrison.

This album, often criticized, is in reality a small, in my opinion, "pop" gem of Dylan, who returns to sing with his voice, sometimes biting and tender in alternating moments, but never out of his depth as he had been on the previous album, and returns to play songs that manage to stand the test of time.