THE KID'S ALL RIGHT
Wallflowers frontman carries on the family tradition of storytelling
“Maybe your heart's not in it no more,” Jakob Dylan sings at the beginning of the new Wallflowers album. It's a provocative thought for the rock 'n' roll warhorse as he puts out his ninth studio album of original songs. Dylan, 51, insists his heart is in Exit Wounds, his new album, a return to the familiar Wallflowers sound — dive-bar guitar, piano, electric organ — though not a familiar lineup. Gone are longtime members Rami Jaffee and Greg Richling. But the band's frontman and lead singer, who has written nearly every song, argued that “the Wallflowers” are his songs, essentially, and the band of rotating musicians simply their vehicle.
“There's never been one lineup that's made two records,” Dylan said. “So the constant is myself. If you think there's a sound of the Wallflowers, I'm making that with my choices in the studio and with my songs and voice.”
That distinctive voice — a gravelly, cigarettes-and-whiskey baritone — has only ripened with age. T Bone Burnett, who produced Bringing Down the Horse, compares it to artists like Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zevon, who sing “way down in their chest.”
“And he's honest,” Burnett said. “I loved that he didn't sing with affectations. Because we all grow up singing, and we learn tricks that we like that this singer did or that singer did — you know, a yodel here, a break there. And sometimes those are all right ... But at the end of the day, it's storytelling. And I think Jakob is a very good, pure storyteller.”
Dylan wrote his first mature song, 6th Avenue Heartache, when he was 18. Burnett has known Dylan since the singer was three, having played on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with Bob Dylan, Jakob's father. “I thought he was a making a courageous choice to go into music, you know, in the wake of his father.”
Commercial success tapered for subsequent Wallflowers albums — Breach in 2000, Rebel, Sweetheart in 2005 — but Dylan made his peace early on with not wanting to chase popularity. He remains grateful for the blockbuster year he had around 1996 and '97 — playing Saturday Night Live, winning Grammys — but he's circumspect about the ephemeral nature of fame.
“I don't change that much year to year, but people change a lot from 12 to 16,” he said. “So being in a group that actually people come along with you, it's not easily done. If someone buys your record and likes it, it can mean the world to them. But then a few years later, they're in college and they're into different things.
“That's the story of a lot of music, a lot of rock bands.”
There's clearly a frustrated cowboy in Dylan, whose lyrics are often filled with horses, smoke-filled bars and rumbling trains. “You just develop a language that works for you, and images that appeal to you,” he said. “I haven't thought about it. I don't know why there's a lot of horses in my records.”
It's more than just the words, though. Dylan was never destined to be a stadium rocker or a confessional, emo singer-songwriter. He's more of a cowboy-troubadour, strumming his guitar by the campfire and spinning stories about “teardrops from a hole in heaven come like ravens dropping down like bombs” — a line from a 2005 song where he declares that “God says nothing back but `I told you so.'”
Dylan's smoky voice often strains and searches, wrestling to leave his throat much like he searches for truth and God in his lyrics — just as his namesake in the Old Testament physically wrestled with God. There is something rabbinical about the homespun wisdom in his lyrics, offered Burnett. “It's really giving you the right question more than giving you an answer.”
“I love these open-ended questions, where you don't get to the bottom of it,” Burnett said. “Like his father wrote that song, `the answer is blowing in the wind.' What does that mean? ... He's got a bit of that gift ... There's an old worldness about him.”
Fatherhood crops up in his lyrics from time to time, as in a hidden track on the Breach album, a lullaby addressed to his “baby bird” set to a chiming, music-box tune. Written when Dylan was a young dad — he shares four sons with his wife of nearly three decades, Paige — it's one of his sweetest and most vulnerable songs. “I'm a father, so it's in all my songs,” he said. “My songs encompass whoever I am. I've been a father for a long time, so that's in my mind.”
Exit Wounds reflects a new stage in life for Dylan, with “more road behind me than ahead of me.”
If there's one recurring theme to all of his work, it's perseverance: “I always want hope in my songs. And it can be 99 per cent not, but I want one per cent hope, because I want to feel like that myself ... I don't want to put that extra negativity in the world.”
Whatever else the Wallflowers is, it's his lifelong project.
“It's like going back and making Jaws 5. It's just my continuation of that thing I started a long time ago. It still matters to me a lot, and there's still a lot of work to be done.”