Like anyone who’s hung around the karaoke bar that is life for long enough, Bob Dylan is finally delving into the Frank Sinatra, announcing that his new covers album of Sinatra-popularized standards, Shadows In The Night, is due out Feb. 3. Though at first blush, the artist who rose to fame as a bohemian, Greenwich Village-bred sideswipe to bloated Rat Pack decadence seems like an odd choice to sing Sinatra, the artists actually have a long intertwined history. In his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan wrote of his love for Sinatra’s “Ebb Tide” and how it “never failed to fill me with awe.” In 1995, Dylan performed at Sinatra’s 80th birthday, serenading Sinatra with his own “Restless Farewell”—reportedly at Sinatra’s request. And of course, both shared a fragile coexistence in the record collections of fathers and their damn hippie sons.
Those now-grown hippies and their much older, likely dead fathers will finally have something to agree on with Shadows In The Night, which Dylan says takes the original songs’ complex arrangements and strips them down for a five piece band, recorded live in “maybe one or two takes.” With that in mind, Dylan says, “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.” It’s the same thing I say whenever I karaoke “My Way.”
Below is the track list and the first preview of the album, “Full Moon And Empty Arms.” Up next, we have Liiiiinda doing “Take On Me.” Linda? Linda?
Shadows In The Night:
1. I’m A Fool To Want You
2. The Night We Called It ADay
3. Stay With Me
4. Autumn Leaves
5. Why Try To Change Me Now
6. Some Enchanted Evening
7. Full Moon And Empty Arms
8. Where Are You?
9. What’ll I Do
10. That Lucky Old Sun