New Morning is the eleventh studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on October 21, 1970 by Columbia Records.
Coming only four months after the controversial Self Portrait, the more concise New Morning received a much warmer reception from fans and critics. Most welcome was the return of Dylan's familiar, nasal singing voice. While he has a slightly nasal tone to his voice on "Alberta #1" from Self Portrait, this was the first full album with his familiar voice since John Wesley Harding in 1967, after which he began singing with a country croon.
New Morning reached No. 7 in the United States, quickly going gold, and gave Dylan his sixth and last UK number 1 album until Together Through Life in 2009. The album's most commercially successful song is "If Not for You", which was also recorded by George Harrison, who played guitar on a version of the song released on 1991's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, and was also an international hit for Olivia Newton-John in 1971.
Details
Dylan discusses the recording of New Morning at length in one chapter of his autobiography, Chronicles, Vol. 1. Several alternate, preliminary forms of the album have been documented, including tracks which later appeared on the unauthorized 1973 album Dylan. He has played only four of the album's twelve songs in concert; "If Not for You", "If Dogs Run Free", the title track and "The Man in Me". "If Dogs Run Free", made its live debut on October 1, 2000, within weeks of the 30th anniversary of the album's original release.
Recording sessions
New Morning was released just four months after Self Portrait and there was some speculation that it was recorded hastily and rushed out as an immediate response to the scathing criticism that surrounded Self Portrait. In fact, much of New Morning was already complete when Self Portrait was officially released.
"I didn't say, 'Oh my God, they don't like this, let me do another one,'" Dylan said in 1975. "It wasn't like that. It just happened coincidentally that one came out and then the other one did as soon as it did. The Self Portrait LP laid around for I think a year. We were working on New Morning when the Self Portrait album got put together."
During the March sessions that yielded most of Self Portrait, Dylan attempted three songs that he later rerecorded for New Morning: "Went to See the Gypsy", "Time Passes Slowly", and "If Not for You". A number of performances were recorded, but none to his satisfaction.
After work on Self Portrait was virtually completed, Dylan held more sessions at Columbia's recording studios in the Columbia Studio Building at 49 East 52nd Street in New York, beginning May 1, 1970.
"Time Passes Slowly"
This is another deceptively simple song where Dylan appears to sing the praises of stability and stasis. There is some sense with lyrics like "ain't no reason to go anywhere" and "time passes slowly and fades away" that maybe Dylan is not as satisfied with inaction as he appears on the surface. "Time Passes Slowly" is one of a few songs on New Morning originally written for Archibald MacLeish's play Scratch. An alternate version of the song featuring George Harrison's guitar playing and harmony vocal appears on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971).
"Went to See the Gypsy"
It is often assumed that Dylan wrote "Went to See the Gypsy" after meeting Elvis Presley, as the song mentions visiting with a mysterious and important man in a hotel. The song also contains the line, "A pretty dancing girl was there, and she began to shout... He did it in Las Vegas, and he can do it here. This lyric was seen by some as a reference to Elvis' record-breaking run of performances in Las Vegas (his series of concerts at the International Hotel commenced on July 31, 1969). The meeting described in the song may have been purely imaginary, however, as Dylan clarified in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stones Douglas Brinkley: "I never met Elvis, because I didn't want to meet Elvis... I know The Beatles went to see him, and he just played with their heads." In the same interview, Dylan expanded upon his imagined mythical image of the singer: "Elvis was truly some sort of American king. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went... I don't know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that. I wanted to see the powerful mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil." A reference to the 'Tenth Avenue bus going west' gives an indication that the song is likely set in New York City. The atmosphere of the song is reminiscent of the recitations recorded by Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter.
"Father of Night"
The final song, "Father of Night", is Dylan's interpretation of the Jewish prayer Amidah. In 1973, the song was covered by Manfred Mann's Earth Band for the album Solar Fire. At 1 minute 32 seconds, "Father of Night" is Dylan's shortest song from a studio-released album.
Reception
Several critics were quick to praise New Morning as a return to form after Self Portrait. Ralph J. Gleason of Rolling Stone heralded the release with a headline declaring "WE'VE GOT DYLAN BACK AGAIN!" and described the album as "beautiful". Reviewing for the same publication, Ed Ward echoed this sentiment and deemed it a "superb album". Ward lauded "Went to See the Gypsy" and "Sign on the Window" as "masterpieces"; he said that the former was "the hardest rocker from Dylan in a 'coon's age", with the singer's voice "back in its raspy, rowdy glory", while the latter "ranks with the best work he's done", including "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and "Like a Rolling Stone". He also praised Dylan's piano playing and concluded by calling New Morning "one of Dylan's best albums, perhaps his best".
Stereo Reviews Noel Coppage said it was not only Dylan's best LP but "the best album I've heard in years" and "for all practical purposes, an album without a flaw". He called the musical arrangements "exemplary" and agreed with those who recognized "Time Passes Slowly" as "the best song Dylan ever wrote", saying that it was "the new anthem for Dylan's people ... It points toward open country and toward family instead of community." Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian found New Morning a departure from all of the artist's previous albums and commented on the range of styles and influences while highlighting Dylan's "dynamite piano". He described the title track as "a marvellous song, pointing to all our best hopes" in its celebration of the simple pleasures of nature and the senses.
Other commentators disagreed that the album marked Dylan's full artistic return. According to biographer Howard Sounes, these more dispassionate listeners found it "a little self-satisfied" and, further to Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait, evidence of the singer's descent into commercialism and conservative values. The NMEs Richard Green said the record fell short of the high expectations created in the build-up to its release and by the high quality of his past work; he wrote that "much of it is standard pop that would be totally neglected if any other artist had done it." Green admired the rock-oriented tracks and predicted that, while the LP would be a big seller, it would "not go down as one of Bob Dylan's best efforts". Morgan Ames of High Fidelity wrote that Dylan remained an intermittently interesting songwriter, but he was no longer "a Force in the way he once was and everyone knows it". Conceding that he had never liked Dylan's singing, Ames said New Morning was not an album he would revisit and that, but for the legend surrounding Dylan, it would have been received as merely "a competent, if not inspired, offering from a country-oriented folksinger-writer".
Village Voice critic Robert Christgau named New Morning the seventh best album of 1970. In comparing the record to Self Portrait, he later wrote: "this time he's writing the pop (and folk) genre experiments himself, and thus saying more about true romance than is the pop (or folk) norm." Christgau highlighted "Winterlude" and "If Dogs Run Free", but panned "Three Angels" and "Father of Night", saying they "make religion seem dumber than it already is".
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Year-end charts
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