The Old Gunfighter Shoots Back: Bob Dylan's Shadow Kingdom Reinvents the Classics

But is it a farewell? I don't think so

In 1991, at the 33rd GRAMMY Awards ceremony, Bob Dylan was handed the GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award by Jack Nicholson. By this point, the public and critical perception was that Dylan was done. Or, at the very least, that we’d never see a Dylan album of the quality of his 60s and 70s oeuvre. Only one of the seven album’s Bob had released in the ten years prior had been met with any real critical praise, that being 1989’s Oh Mercy (although fans would later reclaim 1981’s Shot of Love, 1983s Infidels, and a number of individual tracks scattered throughout Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded, and Down in the Groove), and commercial sales were significantly down. As it was for most of the musical acts who came of age in the 1960s, the 1980s were tough, and the 1990s looked as though they were going to be the end of the road for many.

June 2023 marks the release of Bob Dylan’s latest album, Shadow Kingdom, the artist’s 40th studio album and the 13th since receiving that lifetime achievement award more than thirty years ago. If we factor in releases from, The Bootleg Series, and various official live recordings, the Dylan camp has been releasing material at pretty much the same consistent rate for the last sixty years. On top of that, this June also ushered in the start of Dylan’s Southern-European leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which began in 2021, and is essentially the the post-Covid restart to 40 years of constant touring under the ‘Never-Ending Tour’ banner. And yet, quite naturally, there is significant online discussion as to whether or not, Shadow Kingdom, is a kind of farewell. I’ve been asked by several people whether I believe that the album is a reflective epilogue wrapping up one of the great, if not the greatest, popular music career of the last century.

For context: Shadow Kingdom, was the name given to a pre-recorded concert Bob Dylan and an assortment of high-calibre studio musicians performed during the Covid-19 pandemic. This recording was then given an official release on June 2nd 2023 on all of the usual formats music is available in. What is significant about, Shadow Kingdom, is that it contains very little material. Unlike Dylan’s current live setlist, which is almost entirely constructed of songs from 2020s, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Shadow Kingdom, makes use of songs from what is probably the most recognisable portion of Bob’s career to the vast majority of people. Though it contains fourteen songs, thirteen of them were originally released pre-1975, with only the instrumental outro ‘Sierra’s Theme’ being composed specifically for this release. What, Shadow Kingdom, does is recontextualise those songs (many of which will be familiar to a casual listener) into the Dylan’s 2020s sound. Bob takes the songs away from their original folk-rock styling and imbues them with a smokey, Americana inflected, croon. It’s every bit Workingman’s Dead era Grateful Dead fused with an aged and wisened voice, mature and rich. It reminds one of long midsummer evenings on the porch and half-remembered country jams. This kind of project isn’t unique in Dylan’s discography, live releases tend to show how the style of whichever period it’s from has been grafted onto a number of fan-favourites which were dotted throughout the setlist, but, Shadow Kingdom, feels different. Constructed in the studio and only given a ‘live’ context because of its accompanying video release, the appearance of, Shadow Kingdom, in the form it exists is quite strange. It’s an album, recorded in the studio, mimicking a live album feel, made up of songs which aren’t featured on the current tour. But what it actually achieves, in practice, is injects songs which we are so familiar with, with a completely new life beyond their original recordings. Bob swaggers through the setlist with a kind of confidence that’s enough to make one feel as though this is how these songs, some of which were groundbreaking in their time, were always supposed to sound this way. Dylan, on, Shadow kingdom, is obviously in conversation with these original songs, but, to my ears this conversation does not ring with melancholy or blue. To me, Shadow Kingdom, has many textures but none of them sombre.

There’s a great sense of defiance in the very bones of, Shadow Kingdom. This is the quality that makes me struggle to align with the camp that this is a farewell. To me, this is not the music of the old gunfighter stepping out into the yard to meet their fate. This is the sound of the old master asserting their status in order to remind everyone that they can go at the highest level. Bob Dylan is probably the biggest, although not the only, victim of the ageism present in the rock press. When I was growing up watching rock music documentaries on BBC4 in the 2010s, the narrative was very clear. In the case of Bob Dylan: he popularised folk music between ‘62 and ‘65, committed the highest treason to achieve artistic perfection with 1966s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde before disappearing until 1975s Blood on the Tracks, after which he turned religious and as good as died. And this trajectory was practically the same with a number of other artists of that generation. In the eyes of many critics, once they hit forty musicians have either sold-out, gone soft, or lost the spark. The fact that Johnny Cash had a hit in his 70s was viewed more like a novelty outlier than any serious expectation, ‘Hurt’ being more of a singular farewell divorced from the artistic accomplishment of the American Recordings series. And god forbid you ask such a critic to explain the many rise and fall arcs in the ongoing career of Neil Young. Whilst the case can be made that Bob Dylan’s entire career, and the consistent quality of his output since 1997’s, Time Out of Mind, is a rejection of this notion, Shadow Kingdom feels like a direct attack on this. In choosing to perform songs from his ‘classic period’, Bob is directly opening the door to listeners who dropped off after, Street-Legal, and presenting them with a musical identity which contains the nucleus of what they remember, but which is distinct in its own right. Shadow Kingdom, is a celebration of the passage of time in the life of an artist. It not only says that the songs themselves have a timeless quality, but that the man who wrote them has matured into a timeless musical performer alongside them. It feels essential but I’m not sure it feels conclusive.

I initially started writing this piece thinking that the tandem of Rough and Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom were a rejection of the ageism which pervades popular music criticism. As the week has gone on, I become aware of this split as to what the album ‘means’ in some grandiose, narrative sense. What does, Shadow Kingdom, mean in terms of the narrative of Bob Dylan’s career? And the more I think and the more I write the more I’m unsure if Shadow Kingdom can, or should, be interpreted in any way beyond a master musician, in his older years, offering a new and mature look at his older material. In terms of a farewell? I don’t really believe that Dylan gives a damn that he’s 82. Even the music on, Rough and Rowdy Ways, which is incredibly reflective, doesn’t feel to me as conclusive a statement as Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker, and certainly not a Blackstar. These last two Bob Dylan albums remind me very much of the current late-period works of Martin Scorsese and, to a lesser extent, Paul Schrader, who are filmmakers of a similar age to Dylan who are also exploring more mature takes on the work they are best known for, but who, much like Dylan, seem to be willing to keep working until the final curtain call. And perhaps that’s the only way an artist really can confront a death which can arrive at any minute but who’s date is still unknown.

What Shadow Kingdom says to me is that Bob Dylan believes so intensely in both, the malleability of his songbook, and the quality of his current musical preoccupation. Shadow Kingdom is a joy, completely without a dower moment, and in its bones the past and the present are completely embraced in a beautiful unity. That isn’t to say there aren’t moody ballads; ‘What Was it You Wanted’ is given a gorgeously smokey noir quality that is enrapturing. The album’s highpoint, the new treatment of, ‘Forever Young’, is incredibly moving without feeling like a trite sad old man number. The song is powerful and dignified, reaching tremendous heights whilst being unlike any previous officially released version. There is meditation on the album, of course, ‘Forever Young’ is absolutely in conversation with itself Dylan is aware that he is no longer the man who wrote that song in 1973. But that kind of self reflection isn’t unique to this particular release, it has been the hallmark of Dylan’s sound for my entire lifetime at this point. If people are interpreting, Shadow Kingdom, as a farewell, they must think of 1997s, Time Out of Mind, as a funeral march, the latter album ruminating on the end far more than anything Bob has released since.

What, Shadow Kingdom, does so exceptionally well, is takes all of the listener’s history with those songs and all of Bob’s history with those songs and uses that to build them into these deeply mature objects. We are all getting older. Our relationships to our past are consciously changing. In reassessing our relationships to our own past we needn’t always close the door. Sometimes it’s enough to say ‘this is where I was, and this is where I am now, and those two things can co-exist’. Bob Dylan’s 40th studio album, the 13th since being awarded a retirement present by the industry he dedicated his life too, is one such a moment. Shadow Kingdom, is a triumph, but not because it closes the book on a career, but because it busts the narrative of that career wide open. Let’s stop sitting around pontificating on whether this is the end for Bob because people have been doing that for 50 years now only for them to get cut down every single time. If this is the end, then it will be a picture perfect farewell, but I don’t think this is the case, and I sure as hell don’t think Bob thinks this is the case.

Ryan Sweeney (@TheCautiousCrip/TeaWithZizek)