Modern Times (Bob Dylan album)

2006 album by Bob Dylan

Modern Times is the thirty second studio album by American singer songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 29, 2006, by Columbia Records. The album was the third work (following Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft") in a string of critically acclaimed albums by Dylan. It continued its predecessors' tendencies toward blues, rockabilly and pre rock balladry, and was self produced by Dylan under the pseudonym "Jack Frost". Despite the acclaim, the album sparked some debate over its uncredited use of choruses and arrangements from older songs, as well as many lyrical lines taken from the work of 19th century poet Henry Timrod and Roman poet Ovid. Modern Times became Dylan's first album in the U. S. since 1976's Desire. It was also his first album to debut at the summit of the Billboard 200, selling 191,933 copies in its first week. At age 65, Dylan became the oldest living person at the time to have an album enter the Billboard charts at It also reached in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland, debuted in Germany, Austria and Sweden. It reached in the UK and the Netherlands, respectively, and had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. In the 2012 version of Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", Modern Times was ranked at .

The album was recorded with Dylan's touring band, including bassist Tony Garnier, drummer George G. Receli, guitarists Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman, plus multi instrumentalist Donnie Herron. This iteration of the Never Ending Tour band had played with Dylan for the entirety of 2005. Dylan and band rehearsed the songs at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, in late January and early February, 2006, before heading to New York City to record them. As with its predecessor, Love and Theft, Modern Times was engineered and mixed by Chris Shaw. Shaw remembered the recording sessions going slower for Modern Times than for "Love and Theft": "The sessions for Modern Times went a little slower, it took maybe a month rather than three weeks. Not for any real reason I can pinpoint. Bob had a lot of ideas to sort through, there were a lot of different versions of each song he had to settle on before he could decide where he wanted them to go, and I think he had this vision in his head that maybe he couldn't quite articulate to the band as quickly, so it took a few times trying out ideas to get it to land where he wanted it to be. And I think there was a lot more lyric writing he had to deal with". Freeman remembered the sessions as being difficult, though this is something he doesn't think is evident when listening to the album: "Modern Times was a difficult challenge for me. We were feeling our way through it all, and it seemed like it was going really slow, trying to find the songs. Listening to it, I think it's a very coherent album, musically and lyrically and simple, in a good way. Simple in that the melodies and arrangements are 'right there' and the songs sound to me like they would have come together quickly and easily. But that's not the way I remember it happening. Bob seemed frustrated much of the time. But I never really knew what he was thinking, of course". During a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan said: "This is the best band I've ever been in, I've ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year, you know what you can and can't do, what they're good at, whether you want 'em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs. Whether it's a metal group or pop rock, whatever, you get that gang mentality. But for those of us who went back further, gangs were the mob. The gang was not what anybody aspired to. On this record (Modern Times) I didn't have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me".

Dylan's historical stature, as well as his renewed critical acclaim following Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft", helped to make Modern Times a highly anticipated release. As with "Love and Theft" in 2001, Sony held a listening event for critics far in advance, but those invited were forbidden from disclosing details or opinions about what they heard prior to the official release. Modern Times was leaked online through various BitTorrent and Dylan fan websites on August 21, 2006, after 30 second sound clips were released on the official Sony website. The album was first released in some European countries (including Germany and Ireland) on August 25, in the UK on August 28 and premiered in the U. S. on August 28 on XM Satellite Radio, the satellite radio service that carried Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour program. While the album was marketed as the third part of a conceptual trilogy, beginning in 1997 with Time Out of Mind, Dylan himself rebuffed the notion. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he stated that he "would think more of Love and Theft as the beginning of a trilogy, if there's going to be a trilogy".

Response to Modern Times from music critics was overwhelmingly positive. On Metacritic, a site that tracks prominent critical opinion, Modern Times holds a score of 89 out of 100, indicating "universal acclaim" and putting it among the 100 most acclaimed albums on the site. In a five star review, Rolling Stone critic Joe Levy called the album Dylan's "third straight masterwork", Jody Rosen of Slate concurred, calling Modern Times "a better album than Time Out of Mind and even than the majestic "Love and Theft", which by my lights makes it Dylan's finest since Blood on the Tracks". The album was also credited for original blues and folk rock music which was said to be "hard to hear these days" by critics. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, while enjoying Modern Times, felt that it was "not one of those infrequent, unequivocally fantastic Dylan albums" and ridiculed the lavish praise heaped on the album, writing: "It's hard to hear the music of Modern Times over the inevitable standing ovation and the thuds of middle aged critics swooning in awe." Some reviewers who liked the album were critical of its musicianship, such as the Chicago Tribunes Greg Kot, as well as Jon Pareles of The New York Times, who wrote that "onstage Mr. Dylan's touring band regularly supercharges his songs. But on Modern Times the musicians play as if they're just feeling their way into the tunes". Perhaps the sourest review came from Ron Rosenbaum. Writing in the New York Observer, Rosenbaum called Modern Times, "a wildly overhyped disappointment The new album is possibly the worst since Self Portrait, with songs that rarely rise above the level of Dylan's low point—and everybody seems afraid to say so". Modern Times became Dylan's third successive album to top The Village Voices Pazz & Jop critics' poll, following Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft". The album also topped Rolling Stones list of the 50 best albums of 2006, and was later ranked number eight on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 2000s. At the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in 2007, Dylan won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album for Modern Times and the Grammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for the song "Someday Baby". Elton John is a fan of the album and has cited it as an inspiration for him to try and capture a more live in the studio sound for his 2013 album The Diving Board: "It floored me, that someone of Dylan's great output could come across and make an album like that at his age, which was for me so timeless and sounded so brilliant. I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to make a record again, I've got to make it sort of sounding like that, because that's how I like my records to sound". In a 2020 list of "Bob Dylan's 10 greatest albums" in Far Out magazine, Modern Times was ranked tenth. An article accompanying the list described the album: "Not bound by genre or style, Dylan digs through a plethora of blues, country and rock songs, offering his audience the chance to hear the indigenous stories behind the music. Dylan spins the songs into a thread far more modern but is still able to weave them into the tapestry of the country nevertheless".

Because of the length of the songs, the entire album stretched out to two LPs, making it Dylan's third double album in a row. The album's cover photo is Ted Croner's 1947 photograph Taxi, New York at Night. The image was previously used as a cover by the band Luna for their 1995 single "Hedgehog/23 Minutes in Brussels". The album was released in both standard and Limited Edition formats, with the special edition including a bonus DVD of four Dylan music videos. The DVD contains "Blood in My Eyes" (Promo Video), "Love Sick" (Live at the Grammys, 1998), "Things Have Changed" (Promo Video) and "Cold Irons Bound" (Masked and Anonymous Video).

Shortly after its release, the album sparked some debate in the media concerning its songwriting credits, mainly the liner notes' contention of "All songs written by Bob Dylan", which appears in most editions of Modern Times.

Many of the album's songs have musical roots in well known older compositions, though in all cases, Dylan has given the songs new lyrics. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" is a blues standard first recorded and possibly written by the bluesman Hambone Willie Newbern. An arrangement very similar to Dylan's but with different lyrics was a hit for Muddy Waters, who is also credited with writing the song. Except for the first verse, all the lyrics in Dylan's version are original. "When the Deal Goes Down" is based on the melody of "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)", a signature song for Bing Crosby. "Someday Baby" is based on an old standard that can be traced back to "Someday Baby Blues", recorded by Sleepy John Estes, and made famous in versions by Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters. It is sometimes referred to as "Trouble No More", and often credited to Muddy Waters. "Beyond the Horizon" is based on the melody of "Red Sails in the Sunset", written by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams in 1935. "The Levee's Gonna Break" is based on "When the Levee Breaks" by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. It has been previously adapted by rock acts such as Led Zeppelin. The song has also been in the public domain since 2004.