Bob Dylan’s Triplicate is the third album of American standards that Bob Dylan has released in the past two years. It is also three albums long, with 10 songs on each album, for a total runtime of 95 minutes. Dylan, a songwriter whose most enigmatic refrain is that he is less complicated than everyone makes him out to be, has explained that 10 is the number of completion, a lucky number, “symbolic of light.”
In any case, the project brings the total number of hours of Bob Dylan singing American standards to just under three. Like Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, Triplicate leans most heavily on material associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer with whom Dylan has nothing obvious in common other than that fame turned both men into myths. Some of the songs here—“Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” “Stardust”—are well known, at least to the vanishing population of those who care. Most were written in the misty and unremembered days when the singer still went by Robert Zimmerman, a period on which Dylan has staked his entire career.
The arrangements are polished and controlled: guitar, bass, brushed snare drum, the occasional weep of steel guitar. Dylan’s voice is not, and has not been for nearly 50 years, but coming to a Bob Dylan album for vocals is like going to the state fair for the food: Let’s hope you like it fried. In the absence of a crooner’s virtuosity and polish, there’s character, that great unteachable quality that makes even the marginal doodles of a genius flicker with life. Dylan’s voice—gutted but charming, a ghost banging around in the closet looking for a lightswitch—sounds best on the album’s mid- and uptempo songs, where it carries wisdom and resilience and light, imbuing received wisdom with the bittersweetness of lived experience.
The ballads, beautiful as they are, sometimes feel static, bereft of that innerverse opened by singers like Johnny Hartman or, say, Willie Nelson, whose own standards album Stardust remains a high point for projects like this. There seems to be a tempo threshold below which the songs on *Triplicate *become quicksand for Dylan, turning him from an old scamp into a confused puddle of remorse. Call it the difference between just enough and one too many. (At least he’s not maudlin, the cliff over which all ballads peer.) The exceptions—“There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” “But Beautiful”—tend to be songs whose lyrics offer their singers an opportunity to be funny, a quality Dylan continues to not get enough credit for.
In either case, the gambit—and this has always been Dylan’s gambit as a vocalist—is not to sing well, but to sing appropriately. For the same reasons you wouldn’t cast a 7-year-old as someone’s grandmother, it’s tough to sell “Here’s That Rainy Day” when sung by a singer who sounds like they’ve always stayed dry.
Traditionally, an album like Triplicate would have been a way for a performer to showcase their interpretive powers, the relic of a time when songwriting was consolidated in office buildings and movie studios and popular art was understood—without handicap—to be the product of the division of labor: Some write, some produce, some play, some sing.
The irony is that this is a tradition Dylan helped to destroy. “Tin Pan Alley is gone,” he wrote in 1985, referring to a metonym for the songwriting industry during the 1930s and ’40s. “I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.”
Can and do are different things. We still have our superproducers, our backdoor deliveries, the shapes moving behind the curtains. We also still have our “bad” singers, many of whom are the most interesting vocalists around: Young Thug, Bill Callahan. Things—as the durability of the sentiments behind these songs show—don’t change all that much. Still, 95 minutes is a long time.
Let’s say we take Triplicate at face value. What do we have? A good-natured investigation into the Great American Songbook that allows a wealthy eccentric to stroll, publicly, through the annals of his own mind. One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal. There is something ridiculous about it, something enigmatic, something that glitters with the transcendence of a weird idea brought to stubborn fruition. Something Dylanesque.
