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An album of Dylan covers recorded in lockdown, on the phone. By Sylvie Simmons. Chrissie Hynde ★★★★
Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan BMG. CD/DL/LP
CHRISSIE HYNDE has never been shy about singing other people’s songs. Over the years she’s snuck all sorts of covers into setlists or onto albums. Not to mention her previous solo album, Valve Bone Woe, which was all covers, from Charles Mingus to Barbra Streisand to Nick Drake. Now, two years later, comes another covers album, only this time they’re songs by just one artist: Dylan.
Like Valve Bone Woe – which came about after Hynde found a lost mixtape she’d made years earlier of favourite songs and decided to record them herself – Standing In
The Doorway is something of a lucky accident. But where Valve… was made in the studio, with about 50 musicians, Standing was recorded at home, by text, with just one other person, Pretenders bandmate James Walbourne.
Last year, Hynde and Walbourne were deep in the gloom of their separate lockdowns when deliverance came in the form of the new Bob Dylan single, Murder Most Foul. When Elvis Costello first heard that song, it brought him to tears. Nick Cave found it overwhelmingly comforting. When Hynde heard it, “It changed everything for me”, she says. “Lifted me out of this morose mood.” She called Walbourne and said, “Let’s just do some Dylan covers,” and they did, nine of them, though not Murder Most Foul.
There are songs here from Shot Of Love, Blood On The Tracks, Time Out Of Mind, Infidels, Bringing It All Back Home, Greatest Hits Vol II and The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. One of them would suggest a song; Hynde would write the words on an iPad, sing it into her iPhone and send it to Walbourne, who’d put it on his laptop. He’d then add various instruments – piano, keyboards and guitar mostly, though Hynde plays the rhythm guitar tracks – and send it back, and so on, until the next song.
Some of the vocals sound like first takes, which gives them an honesty (maybe a bit too honest on opening track In The Summertime). But from here on, it’s just lovely. You’re A Big Girl Now is slow and languorous, full of feeling. There’s an almost Waitsian tenderness to Sweetheart Like You. Blind Willie McTell, as much torch song as blues, is ultra-slow, with gentle piano, harmonium, mandolins and electric guitar. Tomorrow Is A Long Time is all the more heartbreaking for its stoicism. Love Minus Zero is a pretty faithful folkie cover, with a dash of steel guitar and birdsong at the end. But the standout is the title track. A 7:14-minute epic, part piano ballad, part hymn, it starts slow and tender then ebbs and swells, with a hypnotic, dreamy instrumental. Tchad Blake (Black Keys, U2) mixed, and makes it sound almost symphonic.
Thinking about it, had Hynde made a covers album of an artist she admires as much as Dylan in a studio with a band and an orchestra, it might have been a much less relaxed experience. The unhurried, intimate approach helps make this such a good listen. Beautiful.