Bob Dylan – New York Skyline Review

Reimagining an album is always a bold choice, especially when it’s the untouchable pairing of Dylan and New Morning. A great album that pits Bob Dylan as an artist always changing, another exposing his tether to the past. That is the tone he would set for decades of his career, and bootleg New York Skyline looks to dig into that a little deeper. A double album comprised of songs from 1969 and 1970. Using Al Kooper’s original tracklist idea for New Morning as a basis, the bootleggers from the Albums That Never Were team are well-placed to provide what becomes a fascinating blur of styles and sounds. Dylan’s voice on Nashville Skyline, the album before New Morning was recorded, is quite unlike anything listeners had heard or have heard since from the veteran songwriter. New Morning has a nasally quality to it that sounds a bit like the original recording of When I Paint My Masterpiece. Dylan is suffering from a cold, or Dylan is digging his heels into the country sounds he grew up with. Either way, it’s a delightfully odd pairing and works well.  

What Kooper had right with New Morning’s original draft is opening on a song that may be one of Dylan’s best. Simple? Sure, but The Man in Me is a fantastic piece of work. A complete and undying love for another, which would prove to be quite the contrast given Blood on the Tracks just five years later. It sounds better when paired with Winterlude, too. At a time when tracklistings feel less important to artists, it’s nice to stumble upon projects where it matters above all. Kooper’s original idea for the pairing of these songs is a fascinating listen, and when you throw in pieces of work like Mr. Bojangles and Tomorrow is a Long Time, you get a sense of what could’ve been had Dylan been a little more careful with what material released, and where it was put. His self-titled 1973 effort is hardly one people return to and is easy to forget, one of the few albums in his discography that’s neither a masterpiece nor a mess worth remembering. But here, Mr. Bojangles shines.  

Pair that with If Dogs Run Free and The Ballad of Ira Hayes and you have an album that, should Kooper’s tracklist have been followed as outlined, has more in common with the earlier years of reportage ballads that Dylan had featured on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan. New York Skyline is a miraculous piece of work. It makes the likes of Winterlude make sense. The second half of the album, too, fares well. Sign on the Window and Father of the Night are neat inclusions. What New York Skyline finds is that Dylan had some strong song choices and well-recorded material, but it just didn’t have the legs at the time to do anything at all. Dylan would partner with The Band and detail a series of live shows, Planet Waves, and provide listeners with Blood on the Tracks in the two years to follow that self-titled release.  

Though more experimental and similar in experience to Self-Portrait, it lacked that bigger thrill. New York Skyline finds that, puts it onto the pedestal it could’ve stayed on, and engages with Kooper’s bold vision. It didn’t settle with Dylan at the time, and we can merely speculate why. Perhaps it is because Dylan had a different idea in mind, and did not want to repeat the process of carrying ballads and brilliant interpretations of the world around him with the familiarity of his 1960s output. Whether that is the case or not, it is clear to hear how different New Morning and Dylan are when separated, but they feel like excellent complements to one another. New Morning may receive the lions share of strong material, but there’s much to enjoy about the Dylan tracks slotted into place across New York Skyline.