Dylan, Bob – The Bell Bookshop

Bob Dylan – retrospectrum

Emma — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Seeing many of my works years after I completed them is a fascinating experience. I don’t really associate them with any particular time or place or state of mind, but view them as part of a long arc; a continuing of the way we go forth in the world and the way our perceptions are shaped and altered by life. One can be as profoundly influenced by events in Morretes, Brazil as the y can be by the man who sells them El País in Madrid.” –Bob Dylan, 2021

Spanning six decades, Retrospectrum showcases the development and range of Dylan’s visual practice, in tandem with that of his musical and literary canon. It features a wide selection of Bob Dylan’s artworks in an array of media, with important works loaned from private collections around the world. The artist’s diverse creations include oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings, as well as his ink, pastel and charcoal drawings and distinctive ironwork sculptures.

Among the artworks presented in Retrospectrum are some of the artist’s earliest ink sketches first published in 1973’s Writings and Drawings that illustrated and compiled Dylan’s lyrics up until that time. These drawings are shown alongside works from last year’s Mondo Scripto series, in which Dylan revisited some of his most renowned lyrics, hand-writing and illustrating them in his unique hand. The book also features the iconic Train Tracks paintings representing The Drawn Blank Series (2008) that first brought Bob Dylan’s visual artworks to critical and popular acclaim.

Retrospectrum also presents paintings from Dylan’s The New Orleans Series and The Asia Series (from 2012 and 2010 respectively), inspired by the artist’s own travels, as well as works from his hugely popular The Beaten Path Series (2015 – present). Among the artist’s most rarely seen pieces are his industrial ironworks, created from repurposed objects that speak to America’s industrial past.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

Emma — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One – and since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.

Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over 60 essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyses what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.

In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years and, like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Dylan Chronicles Vol 01

Emma — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.

‘I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.’

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career.

Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities – smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

‘Chronicles stunned everyone . . . [it’s] clear, apparently frank, unremittingly serious about his musical influences and exquisitely written. It is, in fact, a masterpiece’ Sunday Times

‘Entertaining and surprisingly deprecating… The book’s structure is elegant . . . Chronicles is tautly written, vividly cinematic, and funny . . . a courageous little book’ Financial Times

‘There is something on every page, in every paragraph, that demands attention . . . In rock and roll terms, this book is like discovering the lost diaries of Shakespeare. It may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend’ Daily Telegraph