MUMBAI: A three-disc studio album from Bob Dylan, Triplicate, will be released on 31 March 2017, featuring 30 brand-new recordings of classic American tunes and marking the first triple-length set of the artist’s illustrious career. With each disc individually titled and presented in a thematically-arranged 10-song sequence, Triplicate showcases Dylan’s unique and much-lauded talents as a vocalist, arranger and bandleader on 30 compositions by some of music’s most lauded and influential songwriters. The Jack Frost-produced album is the 38th studio set from Bob Dylan and marks the first new music from the artist since Fallen Angels, which was released in early 2016.
For ‘Triplicate’, Dylan assembled his touring band in Hollywood’s Capitol studios to record hand-chosen songs from an array of American songwriters including Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Once Upon A Time), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (Stormy Weather), Harold Hupfield (As Time Goes By) and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh (The Best Is Yet To Come). The titles of the individual discs are ‘Til The Sun Goes Down, Devil Dolls and Comin’ Home Late.
The artist’s two previous album of classic American songs, last year’s Fallen Angels and 2015’s Shadows in the Night, were both worldwide hits and garnered Grammy Award nominations in the category of Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Fallen Angels achieved Top Ten debuts in more than a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, The Netherlands and Austria, while Shadows in the Night debuted in the Top 10 in seventeen countries, with #1 debuts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Norway.
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Both albums received worldwide critical acclaim, with Randy Lewis writing of Fallen Angels in The Los Angeles Times, “[Dylan] immediately liberates songs from the big band/big orchestra world from which they emerged, and in which they are most frequently revisited…. [He] reaches to the blues at the core of many of these songs. Thus, they elicit the ache of romantic yearning and loss that often gets subsumed by swelling orchestral forces, background choirs or by singers who are more focused on crafting elegant vocals than finding emotional resonance.”
The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick awarded Shadows in the Night five out of five stars and described the work as “spooky, bittersweet, mesmerizingly moving [with] the best singing from Dylan in 25 years.” Jon Pareles wrote of that album in the New York Times, “Mr. Dylan presents yet another changed voice…a subdued, sustained tone….Shadows in the Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.”
Bob Dylan’s seven previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while “Love and Theft” continued Dylan’s Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.
Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist’s most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist’s first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies. Tempest received unanimous worldwide critical acclaim upon release and reached the Top 5 in 14 countries, while Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels were hailed by fans and lauded by critics for Dylan’s singular interpretive artistry.
These seven releases fell within a 19-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, No Direction Home, in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, Christmas In The Heart, in 2009, with all of the artist’s royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.
In December 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” He was a 2012 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He was also the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’honneur in 2013, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000, Doctorates from the University of St. Andrews and Princeton University, as well as numerous other honors.
Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records around the world.
