With one notable exception Dylan picks up where he left off with 2015’s “Shadows In The Night” collection of Frank Sinatra recordings. Whereas the previous album of standards steered through a sparse and lonesome American landscape, Fallen Angels has a lighter lilt, swinging from a lighter happier branch of the tree than it’s predecessor. Here Dylan manages to strip the great American songbook down to it’s bare essentials plugging into the universality that is at the very core of all of these songs. He makes them feel more like anonymously written centuries old pieces of orally handed down traditional music as opposed to songs carefully crafted by hit-seeking American tune-smiths composing straight from the fringes of Tin Pan Alley. Recorded in the same Capitol Records Los Angeles studio that Sinatra himself often recorded his own albums, Dylan said of these session, “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day”. Spoken like a true Nobel Prize winner.
Key tracks: All Or Nothing At All, Polka Dots And Moonbeams, Skylark, On A Little Street In Singapore, That Old Black Magic
