Shadow Kingdom concert first in kind for Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is set to stage his first paid live-streamed concert Shadow Kingdomon July 18. It will be the 80-year-old star’s first live appearance since the release of his much lauded 2020 album Rough And Rowdy Ways.
The performance “will showcase the artist in an intimate setting as he presents songs from his extensive renowned body of work created especially for this event.”
It was December 8 2019 when Dylan last performed live.
Since then, Rough and Rowdy Ways evolved, to debut at Number Two in the US album chart.
It also saw Dylan make history as the only artist to have achieved a Top 40 album in the US in every decade since the sixties. No mean achievement!
Shadow Kingdom is touted as Dylan’s first such special in almost 30 years, harking back to his MTV Unplugged concert of 1994, which was the last time he did any kind of broadcast special.
Very little has been revealed about the nature and content of the show, so fans will just have to wait and anticipate.
The performance begins streaming at 2pm on July 18, presented through Veeps, and can be re-watched, or purchased for the first time for two and a half days after that, ending at 11.59pm on July 20.
Veeps offers artists the chance to play directly for fans via the Internet.
It was founded in 2017 by Good Charlotte’s Benji and Joel Madden.
This Dylan gig is the most high-profile artist they’ve booked to date.
A streaming concert is a big thing for Dylan.
With very few exceptions, he hasn’t allowed the filming of any of his concerts for several decades.
No announcements have been made about whether Dylan might return to the road later this year, or during 2022.
He had made extensive touring plans for 2020 that had to be cancelled due to
COVID-19.
He released Rough and Rowdy Ways on June 19 2020 so none of the songs have yet been played in concert settings.
And there’s another big Dylan occurrence coming up.
A new museum dedicated to the inimitable music legend is set to open in Oklahoma next year.
The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa is scheduled to open its doors on May 10 2022.
It will include “handwritten lyric manuscripts to some of the world’s most treasured songs, previously unreleased recordings, never-before-seen film performances, rare and unseen photographs, visual art and other priceless items that span Bob Dylan’s unparalleled seven decades as one of the world’s most important cultural figures.”
With more than 500 immortal songs to his credit, Dylan’s creativity seems endless, with many reviewers saying that his latest album could come to be seen as his best in years to come.
He keeps on playing. And keeps on performing.
From 1990 until 2019, he played an average of more than 100 shows a year for each of those years, at venues around the world.
He constantly reimagines his songs to present them differently to his live audiences over subsequent nights.
There are always some surprises in his reinterpretations of material both old and new.
At the end of 2020, Dylan sold the rights to his entire songwriting catalogue to Universal Music Group for a cool £225 million.