Christmas With Bob Dylan

Easy listening that’s difficult to listen to. Not much else can be said of Bob Dylan’s 2009 effort Christmas in the Heart, but I’ll say it anyway. After all, ’tis the season of good will and Dylan apologists have been honing the principle of charity ever since his release of Nashville Skyline , forty ye ars earlier.

The opening bells of ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ signal at once that Dylan’s Christmas album is going to be a joyously traditional — and traditionally joyous — take on the genre; closer to Elvis’s Christmas Album and Johnny Cash’s The Christmas Spirit than to, say, A John Prine Christmas or Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow. The idea behind the album was to take the best known Christmas songs and just play them straigh t, with no irony or new angle:

Isn’t there enough irreverence in the world? Who would need more? Especially at Christmas time.

The thought melts away like snow at first sight of the album’s artwork. In the Guardian ’s review, the cover illustration was characterised as a conventional ‘painting of a horse-drawn carriage speeding through snowdrifts’. But I defy anyone to stare at this Victorian sleigh image (sourced by the Grammy award-winning artist Coco Shinomiya) and not see it as a супер-Stalinist vision of the winter season...

Continue reading on Medium