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Northern Sky · Six Degrees of Dylan - Audio Episodes

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Colin McGady and I have a theory.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone changed what a popular song could be and every rock
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: and pop song since can be connected back to it.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is a journey through musical evolution,
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: following the influences,
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: shared ideas and unexpected encounters that connect one record to another.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Six songs, five connections, one destination.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Six Degrees of Dylan.
• 0:26
  [music]
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Before we begin, a quick listening note.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: For licensing reasons, the songs themselves aren't included in this episode.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find today's Spotify playlist linked in the post notes.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'll let you know when to pause and listen,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: and point you towards particular moments in each song.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Take your time, then come back when you're ready to follow the next connection.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy!
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Today we begin with Nick Drake and Northern Sky.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is a song that seems to discover hope while it is being sung.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The arrangement opens out,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: but Drake's voice stays close,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: as though he is still deciding how much of that hope to trust.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Our route takes us through John Cale, Nico,
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson Brown and Warren Zevin, before arriving at Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: We will follow some very real working relationships.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: We will also listen for something harder to put on a credit sheet.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The way an arrangement can give an uncertain person somewhere to stand.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Northern Sky comes from brighter later.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: John Cale plays piano,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: organ and celeste,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: alongside Drake's voice, Dave Pegg plays bass and Mike Kowalski plays drums.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Boyd produced the album.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those names describe a small community around a quiet voice.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the bright keyboard sounds and then to how gently Drake moves through them.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The instruments offer reassurance without Pause here and listen to Nick Drake's Northern Sky.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Notice how the keyboards open up the space around the vocal,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: then come back and we will follow the man playing them.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: John Cale moves from the side of Drake's recording to the center of his own.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Our second song is Paris, 1919, the original 1973 recording in its 2024 remaster.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Chris Thomas produced the album.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hiba Kadri remastered the later edition.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The atmosphere has changed.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: We have left Drake's intimate room for something more ceremonial.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The melody is inviting,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: the orchestral setting is elegant, and yet the song never quite lets us settle.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The words seem to keep a little of their meaning just out of reach.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I hear a tension between a beautiful surface and the uncertainty behind it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is a listening comparison,
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: rather than a claim that Kale borrowed an idea from Northern Sky.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Our factual connection is straightforward.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The player on one record becomes the singer on the next.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is another working relationship waiting beyond this song.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Kale contributed playing and compositions to Nico's Chelsea Girl album.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: That gives us a bridge to Nico,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: although it does not mean that he played on these days,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: the particular recording we are going to hear.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: First pause and listen to John Cale's Paris 1919.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Hear how the poised vocal sits inside the orchestral arrangement and how little
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: the elegance resolves the mystery.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Come back when you are ready to enter a quieter room.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nico's These Days comes from Chelsea Girl, released in 1967.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson Brown wrote it and plays electric guitar on the recording.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Tom Wilson produced it.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Brown later recalled that Wilson brought in Larry Fallon to arrange the strings.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The guitar keeps moving, the strings widen the frame.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nico's voice seems almost to refuse the momentum around it.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: There is feeling here, but she does not point to every emotion as it passes.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: She leaves us to do some of the work.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: After the theatrical atmosphere of Paris 1919, this is a different kind of uncertainty.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Cale and Nico are linked through the album's credits.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: The connection I hear between these two songs is musical.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: A restrained voice held inside a carefully shaped arrangement,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: neither has to explain itself completely to draw us in.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Brown gives us our next unmistakable link.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is present as both writer and guitarist,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Late for the Sky is the title track of Jackson Browne's 1974 album.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are hearing the remastered album recording.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Browne and Al Schmidt produced the record.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: This song begins inside a relationship where familiarity has stopped being
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: the same thing as knowledge.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Two people can share a life and still be living with imagined versions of each other.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: The discovery is not a sudden twist.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is something the performance gradually makes impossible to avoid.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The piano gives the song a place to stand.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The guitar offers another line of feeling.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Brown lets the phrases gather weight without hurrying them towards an answer.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: What sounds like a private conversation begins to feel like the collapse of
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: a whole private world.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: The link from Nico is documented songwriting and playing.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: The next link is just as tangible.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Brown produced Warren Zeven's self-titled album in 1976 and sings harmonies
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: on Desperado's Under the Eaves.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: We are moving from Brown's unsettled intimacy to Zeven's much more sardonic version
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: of insecurity.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pause now and listen to Late for the Sky.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Follow the conversation between piano,
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: guitar and voice,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: especially the way the band supports the vocal without breaking its spell,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: then come back for a hotel room in Los Angeles.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Warren Zeven's Desperados.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Under the Eves is our fifth song.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is the original recording from his 1976 self-titled album, not an alternate take.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Zeven gives us a room that provides shelter without quite providing safety.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: The narrator can imagine catastrophe on an enormous scale,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: but ordinary worries remain stubbornly present.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: There is something painfully funny about the thought that even the end of
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: the world might not get you out of paying your bill.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: The piano connects this performance to Brown's.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: The voice changes the temperature.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Zeven allows irony to sit beside vulnerability.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: He can make a small detail absurd and moving at the same time,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: without asking us to turn his narrator into a hero.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Near the end,
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: the hum of an air conditioner becomes the beginning of something much larger in
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: the arrangement.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Wilson arranged the harmonies.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to how those voices expand the room without pretending that its occupant has escaped.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Our last connection is more than a similarity I hear.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: In his 2009 interview with Bill Flanagan,
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Dylan singled out Desperados Under the Eaves while praising Zevin's writing.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is evidence of appreciation.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is not proof of direct influence between today's two recordings.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Pause here for Warren Zevin's Desperados Under the Eaves.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Follow the everyday hum as it grows into that expansive closing passage.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then come back for Dylan, and a very different kind of exposure.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like a rolling stone changes the pressure at once.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: There is the opening drum strike,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: the movement of the band, and a voice that refuses to let its subject look away.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: After the private rooms we have visited, we are suddenly out in the street.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is Dylan's original 1965 studio recording from Highway 61, Revisited.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: The single reached number two on the American Billboard Hot 100 and number four on
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: the British Singles chart.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: A long, abrasive song about losing the familiar structures of a life became a major pop record.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: The comparison with Zeven is about insecurity and dislocation.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Zeven lets us overhear a person's predicament.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Dylan addresses somebody whose position has collapsed.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: We can hear accusation, liberation, or a more complicated mixture of both.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The song gives us room to argue.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Today's route has not proved that every stop descended from this one record.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: It has let us hear some of the possibilities my theory is concerned with.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Unusual voices,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: arrangements that complicate the words,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: and people who become more interesting when certainty falls away.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Pause for Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the insistence of the voice against the rolling movement of the band.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: When the song has finished, come back for one final thought.