After 20 years in the business, Jakob Dylan has no hang ups about his father. He’s just released his second solo album
IT COMES as a bit of a shock to find the man whom Forever Youngwas written about is now 41. It is best to get Jakob Dylan's parentage out of the way at the start, the way he likes to: "It's been around me all my life" he says patiently. "It's not something I get defensive about. I've been a musician now over 20 years; if people want to assume things about me getting musical handouts or favours, then fine – there'll always be those suspicions. People tend to over think it. It's not an issue for me to feel that I prove anything to anybody. I tend to just swat that talk away. After all, nobody is going to buy an album just because of the surname on the cover."
Dylan was raised in Los Angeles and formed his band, The Wallflowers, in 1989. He has, not that you'd necessarily know it, enjoyed huge commercial success. He's won a Grammy and the band's 1996 album, Bringing Down The Horse(on which he wrote all the songs) sold more than six million copies worldwide. You probably think you don't know any Wallflowers songs but you most likely do – they still get heavy rotation on radio despite the band being on hold for the last few years.
“With the Wallflowers, we went through so many personnel changes – some of them voluntary, some forced – and it really became just me. Going out as a solo artist was no big deal for me.”
If The Wallflowers were in the rock band tradition, solo Dylan is a rootsy, Americana revelation. This is cerebral and roughed-up folk – shot through with dust-bowl imagery, spiritual questioning and a real sense of recession-era blues. It this his Nebraska?
"I'd love it to be my Nebraska– especially if I had just released Born To Runbefore this," he says. "I'm not sure though about what you say about 'recession blues'. If it sounds the way it does it's because I've never really written records in the modern language. I like traditional things and music that has substance and value. But I don't want to be a throwback or to be holding a torch for anyone else's music. I grew up around records that were benchmarks – but that doesn't mean any one person owns acoustic music."
Like many of his fortysomething ilk, Dylan is baffled and politely repulsed by today’s chart music. “It’s got to the point now, with the amount of technology used, that the sound itself has become offensive.
“There is no nourishment in today’s music. Technology has backfired, Pro Tools has backfired. It’s all just become a little too claustrophobic,” he says.
Dylan's current album, his second solo album, Women and Country– released three months ago – has been picking up excellent reviews. It has a post-apocalyptic feel – depicting a landscape scarred by environmental disaster and financial ruin. People turn to religion with questions aplenty.
"It's called Women and Countrybecause most things are an extension of women and country. These are the beginning and the ends of our efforts – and this matters now more than ever before," he says. From the scene-setter opener Nothing But The Whole Wide Wordthrough to the album highlight, Everybody's Hurting("Been walking the dirt floor, my eyes are open, Lord/ Where did you go, have we just left you bored . . ./ Ain't milk and honey we're movin' around,/ Only one thing is certain . . . that's everybody, everybody is hurting") it's an uncommonly poignant evocation of a doomed post-industrial, recession-battered society. The judicious use of peddle steel guitars, banjos and fiddlers add to the Steinbeck/Dust Bowl feel.
“I wanted horns and fiddle – more instrumentation than I had on the previous album – to get that bigger sound which I knew would change the lyrics and the tone of the songs,” he says. “Themes did emerge – materialism, economy, politics – but I was working within the parameters of American rural images.”
Dylan can't speak highly enough of Women and Country's producer – the legendary T-Bone Burnett, who was behind Robert Plant's and Allison Krauss's Raising Sand.
“T-Bone’s mind is just unpolluted. He does something very special for someone like myself. I know him well enough now to be able to reach out to him,” he says. “He’s a real historian when it comes to blues and folk music. I had worked with him before, years ago, on a Wallflowers record and he came up with the challenge of this album for me. I had to get him at a certain time so I wrote about 15 songs during one month. I can’t recommend him enough; everyone making a record should have him in the room.”
The sound Jakob Dylan has arrived at now is one that is sincerely executed, and far from his beginnings as a teenager playing in rowdy Los Angeles bars.
“We weren’t even playing to get signed or anything – just doing it because it was such a blast. I admit, I may have got noticed before other 19-year-olds but this was never about being a star. And I still don’t feel defined by the music I make.”
With Women and Country,Jakob Dylan has perversely stepped into the shadow of his family heritage by recording such an affective, lyrically dense folked-up album. But it's on his own terms.
Women and Countryis out now. Jakob Dylan plays Tripod, Dublin on July 27 and the Roisin Dubh, Galway on July 28
