At some point in an artist’s career, there comes a time when you must release a Bob Dylan cover. From Adele to Warren Zevon and everyone in between, there is always a reason to cover the veteran songwriter. He’s off on a tour of Europe and the United Kingdom this month, and what better way to celebrate the 85-year-old songwriter hammering away on his piano than to listen to Bodega‘s cover of Slow Train. Veteran Dylan fans will know this song well. It’s on the fringes of popular and comes from a period where Dylan found God and made it the purpose and point of his time in the studio. It holds up surprisingly well, at least well enough for New York City-based indie sleaze artists to tackle it in the studio. New instrumentals and revised lyrics, words that had Dylan raging against ambassadors meddling in the affairs of the United States, the slow train still relevant beyond its religious connotations. Few musicians can say they’ve made a cover “their own,” but Bodega can.
This sounds nothing like the Dylan classic. It defies the point and premise of a cover song, to reinterpret the instrumentals or lyrics, but keep the sentiment and style of the original intact. This goes beyond what a cover song should offer. It’s an exceptional piece of guitar rock, some repeated, echoed deliveries of that slow train coming around the bend, brings it all together. Having the instrumental style be completely different is one change, but the lyrical structure is thrown out entirely. Slow Train is adapted with the eponymous line in mind and little more. Reimagining is a better word for it, rather than cover. But that’s the thrill of the adaptive process and Bodega has nailed it with their rendition of Slow Train, pulling at those prophetic themes and finding within a message that still remains relevant. The pursuit of ambition and the rejection of that “brotherly love” as they note here, that’s still at play, but to worrying extremes in the world around us.
Bodega fits Slow Train to their instrumental style. The alternative scene is filled with groups that have fashioned out some strong principles and stronger guitar work, and Bodega get to show off both here. Few bands are trying to tackle the mighty artists who set the standard before them, let alone diving into their deep cuts and offering them some incredible, electrifying riffs. Any great cover will have you wanting to listen to the original, and Bodega manages that. Not because their version is a lesser version, but because they’ve picked up on a particular theme that other covers, and even Dylan when performing Slow Train live (not that he’s done so since 1981) missed. We have enough songs. Just keep finding new meaning in the classics. Don’t, really, do that. Bodega has riffed on ideas presented by one of the greats.
To get something more from a song that felt so direct and simple by Dylan’s standards at the time of its release is a miracle in motion. Slow Train does stand as an oddity of Dylan’s discography, a song that is objectively great and also just plain cool. How can you adapt that into something not better, but different? Bodega finds out, and it’s a worthy compilation of new ideas and those old lyrics. No mention of ambassadors but of ambition and the toxicity that now comes about as a result of such aims. There’s a darkness present in the Dylan original that is extracted and moulded by new words from Bodega. It’s a gutsy, ambitious adaptation that the band pulls off incredibly well.
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