Lost on the River:
The New Basement Tapes
The New Basement Tapes
Electromagnetic/Harvest
Serendipity can’t be scheduled, but recording sessions can.
The producer T Bone Burnett was offered, out of the blue, a batch of lyrics that Bob Dylan wrote in 1967, when Dylan and the Band were in upstate New York recording what would become known as The Basement Tapes. They were tall tales, surreal travelogues, love songs, existential riddles and exercises in wordplay — unmistakably Dylan.
To turn them into songs, Burnett sent the lyrics to selected rootsy songwriters — Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops — and booked two weeks at a Hollywood studio for them to all work together. Unlike the seclusion that Dylan and the Band enjoyed in 1967, there was a documentary crew on the premises; Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, arrives on Nov. 21 on Showtime.
It’s a project that could have easily capsized under its own self-consciousness and the weight of the Dylan legacy. The fallback approach of the New Basement Tapes, as the collective was named, is the stately sound of the Band, filtered through Burnett’s cinematic approach to traditionalism; the songs unfurl as they go, gathering resonance and gravity. But the personalities of the songwriters, who are bandleaders on their own, push through: Mumford’s plaintive earnestness and dramatic crescendos, James’ dreamy absorption, Goldsmith’s humble storytelling and Costello’s cynical grit or spooky melancholy.
Giddens, the relative newcomer, has been playing traditionalist string-band music in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and her fiddle glides through many of the arrangements. On lead vocals (and, usually, banjo), she’s the album’s revelation, singing melodies that hark back to Celtic modes with a decisive presence and a haunting grace. Her Spanish Mary — one more of Dylan’s irresistibly magnetic mystery women — could almost be a centuries-old Appalachian tune, though the arrangement gusts toward psychedelia.
Songs don’t write themselves, even with lyrics as vivid as those Dylan provided. The full 20-song version of the album includes alternate settings. James makes Hidee Hidee Ho — “makin’ love where e’er we go” — a jaunty piano shuffle, the closest thing on the album to the sense of humor that runs throughout the original Basement Tapes. Giddens hears it as a tale of restlessness and abandonment, sung in a creaky, mountain-granny voice.
The album’s title song, Lost on the River also gets two versions. It has verses about lovesick loneliness, and a chorus that concludes, “I got lost on the river, but I got found.” For Costello, it’s a slow waltz with an exposed electric guitar, moving from desperation to solace. For Giddens (sharing writing credit with Mumford) it’s an otherworldly plaint with sparse acoustic backup and high harmonies from the Lovell Sisters, concluding in a sorrowful minor key. Neither sounds like the song Dylan might have written, yet each is entirely convincing on its own.
— JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
Nick Jonas
Nick Jonas
Island
Nick Jonas, formerly the frontman of the virginal Jonas Brothers, has been emerging from boy-band melancholia for a few years now. First, he built for himself a 1960s-style soul-rock band, Nick Jonas & the Administration, that released one little-wanted album. Now, he’s acting in Kingdom, a DirectTV original series, as a mixed-martial-arts fighter learning about his sexuality; he recently did a photo shoot for a magazine, grabbing his crotch in vintage Marky Mark pose; and he’s just released a self-titled album that’s his most mature and riskiest work to date.
Risky in the context of his past, that is. In the Jonas Brothers, the family band that was the anchor of the Disney-pop assault of the late 2000s, he was the sensitive singer-songwriter savant in a system that couldn’t fully accommodate his talents. In truth, the nas Brothers were as worthy as any American rock band of the 2000s, reflecting both their peppy harmonies and sticky choruses, as well as the general decline in the competition.
But it has not been easy going for the brothers in the years since. Kevin got married, starred in a reality show and is now apparently a contractor, at least if his recent appearance on The Real Housewives of New Jersey is to be believed. Joe released an undercooked dance-pop solo album, Fastlife, and has lately been blogging about fashion.
That leaves the family’s musical legacy in the hands of Nick. And with Nick Jonas, he’s just at the crest of relevance. This is an album that would have made a tremendous amount of sense in, say, 2013, somewhere between Justin Timberlake’s overblown double-album opus and Robin Thicke’s icy 1970s-soul updates.
Jonas is a capable singer, with an effective falsetto, and as a signifier of maturity, you suspect, he’s switched from applying it to rock to putting it in service of R&B. (He also curses, which matters only if you believed that the purity rings the Jonas Brothers once wore warded off all sin for time eternal.) Like Timberlake and Thicke, he is a classicist at heart, though his sweet spot is mid-1980s club soul, rendered with less bop — think of a less angular Club Nouveau.
He’s zippy and fresh on the Minneapolis funk of Teacher and also on the brooding, grinding pop-soul of Chains. And in places on this album, he also hints at an affinity for R&B’s recent slow-groove countermovement. The beat of Numb is all low-end scrape and poke, and he metes out his phrasings carefully, with plenty of blank space. The ethereal Push, with its dense imagery, is doing its best to pass for a Frank Ocean song.
The high point is Jealous, which initially appears to be part of his throwback-minded sound, with a slick 1980s groove. But then, on the song’s remix, he collaborates with the young space-soul sensualist Tinashe, one of this year’s R&B finds. It’s a success, the one moment in which Jonas’ 2013 sounds totally at home in 2014.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service
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