Bob Dylan ‎ New Morning Rare 1970 Columbia Records Original LP Vinyl NM

$

30

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New Morning Studio album by  Bob Dylan Released October 21, 1970 Recorded June–August 1970 Studio Columbia 52nd Street (New York City) Genre Country rock Length 35:21 Label Columbia Producer Bob Johnston Bob Dylan chronology Self Portrait
(1970) New Morning
(1970) Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II
(1971) Singles from New Morning

1. "If Not for You" / "New Morning"
   Released: 1971

New Morning is the eleventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on October 21, 1970 by Columbia Records.

Coming only four months after the controversial Self Portrait, the more concise and immediate New Morning received a much warmer reception from fans and critics. Most welcome was the return of Dylan's familiar, nasal singing voice. While he has a slightly nasal tone to his voice on "Alberta #1" from Self Portrait, this was the first full album with his familiar voice since John Wesley Harding in 1967, when he began singing with a country croon. In retrospect, the album has come to be viewed as one of the artist's lesser successes, especially since the release of Blood on the Tracks (1975) which is generally regarded as the fuller return-to-form, but is otherwise still well-received, and is still considered a major improvement over its predecessor.

It reached No. 7 in the US, quickly going gold, and gave Dylan his sixth and last UK number 1 album until Together Through Life in 2009. The album's most successful song from a commercial perspective is "If Not for You", which also was recorded by George Harrison, who played guitar on a version of the song released on 1991's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, and was also an international hit for Olivia Newton-John in 1971.

Reception

Several critics were quick to praise New Morning as a return to form after Self Portrait. Ralph J. Gleason of Rolling Stone heralded the release with a headline declaring "WE'VE GOT DYLAN BACK AGAIN!" and described the album as "beautiful". Reviewing for the same publication, Ed Ward echoed this sentiment and deemed it a "superb album". Ward lauded "Went to See the Gypsy" and "Sign on the Window" as "masterpieces"; he said that the former was "the hardest rocker from Dylan in a 'coon's age", with the singer's voice "back in its raspy, rowdy glory", while the latter "ranks with the best work he's done", including "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and "Like a Rolling Stone". He also praised Dylan's piano playing and concluded by calling New Morning "one of Dylan's best albums, perhaps his best".

Stereo Review's Noel Coppage said it was not only Dylan's best LP but "the best album I've heard in years" and "for all practical purposes, an album without a flaw". He called the musical arrangements "exemplary" and agreed with those who recognized "Time Passes Slowly" as "the best song Dylan ever wrote", saying that it was "the new anthem for Dylan's people ... It points toward open country and toward family instead of community." Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian found New Morning a departure from all of the artist's previous albums and commented on the range of styles and influences while highlighting Dylan's "dynamite piano". He described the title track as "a marvellous song, pointing to all our best hopes" in its celebration of the simple pleasures of nature and the senses.

Other commentators disagreed that the album marked Dylan's full artistic return. According to biographer Howard Sounes, these more dispassionate listeners found it "a little self-satisfied" and, further to Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait, evidence of the singer's descent into commercialism and conservative values. The NME's Richard Green said the record fell short of the high expectations created in the build-up to its release and by the high quality of his past work; he wrote that "much of it is standard pop that would be totally neglected if any other artist had done it." Green admired the rock-oriented tracks and predicted that, while the LP would be a big seller, it would "not go down as one of Bob Dylan's best efforts". Morgan Ames of High Fidelity wrote that Dylan remained an intermittently interesting songwriter, but he was no longer "a Force in the way he once was and everyone knows it". Conceding that he had never liked Dylan's singing, Ames said New Morning was not an album he would revisit and that, but for the legend surrounding Dylan, it would have been received as merely "a competent, if not inspired, offering from a country-oriented folksinger-writer".

Village Voice critic Robert Christgau named New Morning the seventh best album of 1970. In comparing the record to Self Portrait, he later wrote: "this time he's writing the pop (and folk) genre experiments himself, and thus saying more about true romance than is the pop (or folk) norm." Christgau highlighted "Winterlude" and "If Dogs Run Free", but panned "Three Angels" and "Father of Night", saying they "make religion seem dumber than it already is".

In his contemporaneous review for The Times, Richard Williams wrote that New Morning showed Dylan left behind by recent trends and "a newer generation finds it hard to understand what the fuss is about". Writing for Rough Guides, Nigel Williamson says that music historian Sean Egan "astutely" summarized the issue when he commented: "[Dylan's] music was no longer an elemental thing ... his world view was limited to the end of the driveway of the home that his wife baked in and his children caroused through." Williamson calls New Morning a "fine album" but, despite the excitement of Dylan's supporters at Rolling Stone, "more of a false dawn".

Track listing

All songs are written by Bob Dylan.