"Bob Dylan - World Gone Wrong"

In 1992, the sort of album you'd expect from Bob Dylan would've been...well, you probably wouldn't have known what to expect from him. He'd bounced all over the map over the course of his (then) 30 year career, and his previous two or three albums had been no exception--Oh Mercy was a densely-layered atmospheric masterpiece, The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 was a career-spanning best of what never was, and Under the Red Sky was a bizarre, sparse album that bordered on the absurd (Dylan supposedly was writing an album of children's songs there, but that's never been proven).

What you probably wouldn't expect would be an album of voice, guitar and harmonica from the old master. What you'd expect even less would that it was an album made up entirely of covers of traditional folk songs.

But that's exactly what Dylan did in 1992 with Good As I've Been to You. Then he did it again the next year with World Gone Wrong.

World Gone Wrong is an astonishing album. Dylan shakes the weight of years off the songs and his own bones and gives these songs a read that is very traditional but also very Dylan. His whiskey rasp of a voice, his basic but evocative playing style, and his unusual song selection make World Gone Wrong an entertaining album full of discovery.

In a lot of ways, it's interesting how these songs, old as most of them are (all but one are considered "traditional," which means they've been around a damn long time and no one quite remembers who wrote them), still seem fresh and current in Dylan's interpretations. The songs have a timeless quality to them, a sense that they've always existed and will continue to exist after mankind is long since gone. You get the feeling, listening to Dylan and his lived-in voice, that he pulled these songs from the air, from some other plane of existence where they've resided from time out of mind, and that the songs serve as some sort of message from God or the beyond. It's haunting. I'd never heard any of these songs (though I knew of "Stack a Lee"), but they spoke of something primative and basic and fundamental in human experience. They called for your attention from across the years.

A big part of the effectiveness of this album is, of course, due to Dylan's readings of these songs. Song selection was important, but it's Dylan's understanding of the underlying meaning and emotion of each song that really makes this album work. There is a beauty to the simplicity of this record, a sense that these songs could exist in no other way than they do here. And there's a power in that, and a purity, even when the songs are about murders and the collapse of the world and great loss and suffering. Dylan transmutes these songs from a bygone era into something that applies to any time, any place.

World Gone Wrong is the sort of album Dylan's folkie followers of the early '60s always wanted from him. That it comes 25-30 years too late is too bad for them, but at least we still get the benefit of an excellent record full of amazing songs. Definitely worthwhile.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "Stack a Lee"