SOUND CHOICE

Shadows In The Night

Columbia

Bob Dylan

It’s not a put-on. Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night, an album of 10 songs that were all recorded by Frank Sinatra, is a tribute from one venerated American musician to another, a reconsideration of a school of songwriting, a feat of technical nostalgia and a reckoning with love and death.

Dylan devotes the album to a particular subset of the Sinatra legacy. It’s not Sinatra the airborne swinger or Sinatra the voice of confidence. It’s the Sinatra who made thematic albums about separation and heartache — albums like Where Are You? in 1957, which included four of the songs Dylan revives, and No One Cares (1959) and All Alone (1962), which each supply one. They are ballads, mostly Tin Pan Alley standards, sophisticated enough to be utterly succinct. They never move faster than midtempo and they often luxuriate in melancholy; they testify, above all, to loneliness.

Shadows In The Night (Columbia) offers bait for trivia seekers. Sinatra was born in 1915, 100 years ago. The opening track, I’m A Fool To Want You, is one of very few songs with a Sinatra songwriting credit. The front cover emulates the vertical-bar design of the jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s album Hub-Tones, which was released — like Dylan’s debut album — in 1962. The photo on the back poses Dylan and a masked woman in formal wear at a nightclub table, alluding, perhaps, to the 1966 Black and White Ball, a masked ball that gathered a glittering assortment of 1960s celebrities, including Sinatra and his new wife, Mia Farrow. In the photo, Dylan holds a Sun Records single, a touch of rock; its title is too grainy to decipher.

But there’s no posing in the music. Dylan brought his touring band to a studio where Sinatra often recorded, Capitol Records’ Studio B, and he sang the songs with his five-man touring band. They recorded live and listening to one another in the room without headphones; turn the album up too loud and you can hear amplifiers humming as songs begin and end.

“There was no tuning and there was no fixing,” the album’s engineer, Al Schmitt, said in an online interview. “Everything is what it was.”

The arrangements are largely of a piecue. The young, suave Sinatra found tragedy and melodrama in these songs, which he often sang as slowly as Dylan does. But where Sinatra had string orchestras, Dylan has Donny Herron’s pedal-steel guitar, perpetually hovering and gliding, and Tony Garnier’s bass, often bowed with grave watchfulness. The guitars of Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball melt into the chords; the drummer George Receli relies on brushes. And for these songs, Dylan presents yet another changed voice: not the wrathful scrape of his recent albums, but a subdued, sustained tone. It’s still ragged; he is 73. But he carefully honours the melodies, even the trickier chromatic ones, and he fully inhabits the lyrics.

He’s not suave; he has seen too much. In I’m A Fool To Want You, he begs, “Pity me, I need you”, knowing full well that he’s embracing misery. Autumn Leaves isn’t a throwaway jazz exercise but a reflection on solitude and advancing time. Full Moon And Empty Arms, adapted from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, becomes a ghostly country shuffle; even as Dylan sings about wishing for a reunion, his voice knows better than to hope. Dylan has been performing Stay With Me, sung by Sinatra for the 1963 film The Cardinal, to end his recent concerts; it’s a humble prayer, and Dylan sings it on the album with weary repentance.

Not every song thrives under Dylan’s treatment. Some Enchanted Evening is stiff, and Why Try To Change Me Now denies the song’s humour. But even when it falters, Shadows In The Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.

— Jon Pareles

Wallflower

Verve Records

Diana Krall

Diana Krall sounds glum and fatigued on Wallflower, a collection of 70s and 80s songs associated with the Eagles, Elton John, The Carpenters and others, that sustains a mood of quiet desperation. The muted, wistful tone is established with the opening cut, California Dreamin’, the Mamas and the Papas’ first hit in which Krall’s somnolent delivery suggests a snowbound New Englander longing for brighter days and happier times on a frigid winter evening. It is deepened by her rendition of Desperado, the Eagles’ ballad comparing a rock star’s gruelling life on the road to the exhaustion of an ageing cowboy reluctant to come in from the range.

The most evocative cut is The Carpenters’ hit Superstar, the plea to a rock star by a besotted fan to remember her long after their dalliance. As Krall murmurs, “Loneliness is such a sad affair”, sounding like Peggy Lee in her sultry boudoir mode, those words define an album whose other depictions of unhappy relationships include I Can’t Tell You Why, Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, Don’t Dream It’s Over, I’m Not In Love and Alone Again (Naturally), sung with Michael Bublé.

Wallflower was produced and arranged by the megahit maker David Foster, whose lush but static string arrangements, written by William Ross, couch each song on a soft feather bed. Where Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing. But on Wallflower, drums are minimal.

The record, whose title song is an obscure, country-inflected Bob Dylan number, has the feel of a sullen concept album by a woman who feels abandoned. It is tempting to imagine that it reflects the frustrations of her marriage to Elvis Costello. These two great musicians, after all, are driven workhorses who are on the road much of the time on separate tours. Loneliness is such a sad affair.

— Stephen Holden