Old words + new music = mixed results

Revisiting projects that marry the work of Dylan, Guthrie and Cash to music by contemporary artists

I was listening to a podcast interview with Will Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Palace  Brothers), when he mentioned The New Basement Tapes, an ill-fated 2014 project that sought to put recently discovered Bob Dylan lyrics from the Basement Tapes era to music. Oldham brought it up because he was recounting the tale of working with producer T-Bone Burnett on the "True Detective" soundtrack. 

Wondering what it would be like to work with Burnett in the studio, he sought a window into that world. "There was a documentary of this weird, contrived session called 'The New Basement Tapes,'" he said, "which was just Bob Dylan's crew trying to find ways to wring more money out of the gullible audience he's developed over the years."

I felt the same way when it came out nine years ago, but given that my fandom for Dylan has only grown over that time, I thought I ought to revisit the album and see if that opinion held. I ended up taking a survey of several albums with similar origin stories and found they are very hit or miss affairs.

The genesis of the Dylan project was a clutch of song lyrics written around the time of "The Basement Tapes," his prolific sessions with The Band at Big Pink in New York in the time between his July 1966 motorcycle accident and his re-emergence in December 1967 with John Wesley Harding. Apparently Dylan was so prolific that some of the lyrics he was writing never made it to the basement, or at least were never recorded. Someone in Dylan's camp gave them to Burnett and suggested he do something with them. He assembled an all-star combo, asked them to write music for the lyrics, and then recorded the results.

Barring a miraculous result, my predisposition was going to make this a hard sell. It includes an artist who is usually interesting but rarely very compelling of late (Elvis Costello), those who had great early music (Jim James) or above-average early music (Taylor Goldsmith) but whose more recent work doesn't do much for me, one I can't stand (Marcus Mumford) and a true talent who just doesn't scratch my itch (Rhiannon Giddens). So, I must admit I didn't give it much of a chance. Feeling much as Oldham did, I listened once, though likely not all the way through, and then  put it aside for the last nine years.

What I found with fresh ears this week is what I left to the side nine years ago: an impeccably recorded, too-often lifeless collection of songs that make me pine for the melodies and arrangements Dylan might have lent these lyrics, or at least a scrappier, less-reverent set of musicians to carry out the project.

For anyone who has heard Dylan's Basement Tapes, you would be forgiven for expecting a bit of a romp, friends literally jamming in the basement. There were serious songs among those tackled with The Band, of course, but many are absurd and fun. The New Basement Tapes, in contrast, are serious takes on slight lyrics. These are songs that Dylan, who was churning them out at a furious pace, deemed unworthy of follow up. He might have lost them, might have moved beyond them too quickly, might have simply had too many songs tackle all of them, but he never finished them. That cavalier attitude would have served these musicians well. Instead, they mostly seem as if they have removed the lyric sheets from a special case with white cotton gloves, afraid to tarnish the work of a legend.

A few capture the right tone, letting a bit of life seep in. James' "Nothing To It" works, and Costello seems willing to make things his own by allowing his personality to dominate. I can't imagine wanting to listen to "Married to My Hack" more than once, but at least it seems to capture what this project ought to be.

I suppose part of the problem is I can hear Dylan singing these songs, can hear the way he would likely arrange the tunes. From the opening salvo of "Down on the Bottom," the project strikes a wrong note. And yes, I know that's my problem. This isn't Dylan, just his words. But when you see a verse like

Down on the bottom

Down to the last drop in the cup

Down on the bottom

No place to go but up

you know what Dylan would do with this. And it's not this. I know it's not fair to criticize something for what it is not rather than evaluating what is there. That's difficult to do in this case, because the artistry being subsumed is that of the most distinctive artist of the past 50 years. If the goal for Lost on the River is to get some Dylan lyrics into the public sphere, mission accomplished. If it was to do so by creating songs that people will enjoy, that depends on the listener. These ears hear talented people sucking all the life out of a song lest they wrongfoot the work of a hero. The verdict: This would have been better without Mumford and Goldsmith (doing his best James Taylor on lyrics that don't fit that gauzy 70s frame), but there are moments that justify the exercise.

Disappointed, I pulled out Mermaid Avenue, the first of two collaborations between Billy Bragg and Wilco where they set Woody Guthrie lyrics to music. This, to my mind, was the gold standard. The draw is a still relatively young Wilco caught between Being There and Summerteeth, a shambling, irreverent combo that gave the proceedings and energy that is mostly lacking from the Dylan project. Still, after listening to this and the follow up, I realized that both collections are front loaded, and by the time of a closet-clearing set that added a third volume with songs that didn't make the first two, it was clear the fresh ideas didn't keep pace with Guthrie's output. The batting average was not as high as I had recalled, highlights placed on mix CDs casting a rosy hue on the source.

The highs, however, are head and shoulders above anything else I heard on my Dylan excursion. "California Stars" is among the best things Jeff Tweedy and Wilco have ever done, "Hoodoo Voodoo" is a fun romp that captures the true spirit of Dylan's Basement Tapes, and Bragg's "All You Fascists" is still (frighteningly) relevant today. 

Better as a cohesive album is New Multitudes, a similar project from Tweedy's old bandmate Jay Farrar. Collaborating with Anders Parker (Varnaline), Will Johnson (Centro-Matic) and Jim James (who seems to be his generation's Costello, tapped for every all-star project), the musicians set Guthrie lyrics to music and recorded the results. The 2012 album is not as flashy as the Dylan or Mermaid Avenue projects, but it's all the better for it. The four, joined by occasional side performers, truly came together as a band, recording an organic sounding set that highlights Guthrie's words and places them in a simpatico context. It's a gorgeous album, and the highlight of this exercise for me is putting it back in rotation.

One last project of this ilk had escaped notice when it was released in 2018. Johnny Cash: Forever Words. This is very different from the others. In this case, the source was a book of poems and other writings found among Cash's things after his death. These weren't meant to be songs, but after the work was published as a book, the obvious next step was to put some of it to music. Costello and Burnett are featured here, along with artists like Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss, Chris Cornell, and John Mellencamp.

In this case, each artist wrote music for a particular poem, recorded it and submitted it. There was no attempt to create a band or bring cohesion to the whole. You get Cornell's haunting wail on "You Never Knew My Mind," Kris Kristoffferson's gravelly recitation of "Forever" laid atop Willie Nelson's solo guitar take of "I Still Miss Someone," and Robert Glasper's jazzy R'n'B take on "Goin', Goin', Gone." Highlights are a matter of taste, but by allowing each artist to tackle a single track, the producers avoid the forced camaraderie of the Dylan project.  And hearing Rosanne Cash give voice to her father's words, or Carlene Carter sing a love song written for her mother, add weight to the proceedings.

One element of The New Basement Tapes project that was appealing was that Burnett didn't assign songs, so everyone could take a crack at everything. This results in different approaches to a few of the songs, available on the deluxe version of the set. In this case, the different takes aren't incredibly illuminating. James and Giddens each offered a "Hidee Hidee Ho," for example, but the source material didn't allow for much variety. 

But the idea of these lyrics — be they by Dylan, Guthrie, Cash or others — being used again and again, just as Dylan and others have used folk lyrics over the years, is appealing. Let new minds find new things in these words, let new artists continue to mine this seam. You’ll get some duds along the way, but when the right artist finds the right music for the right lyric, the stumbles along the path are worth it to reach that destination.