Modern Times

Japanese Blu-spec paper sleeve pressing. Features 2013 remastering. Modern Times is the thirty-second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 29, 2006 by Columbia Records. The album was Dylan's third straight (following Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft) to be met with nearly universal praise from fans and critics. It continued it's predecessors' tendencies toward blues, rockabilly and pre-rock balladry, and was self-produced by Dylan under the pseudonym "Jack Frost". Despite the acclaim, the album sparked some debate over it's uncredited use of choruses and arrangements from older songs, as well as many lyrical lines taken from the work of 19th-century poet Henry Timrod. Modern Times became the singer-songwriter's first #1 album in the US since 1976's Desire. It was also his first album to debut at the summit of the Billboard 200, selling 191, 933 copies in it's first week. At age 65, Dylan became the oldest living person at the time to have an album enter the Billboard charts at number one. [1] It also reached #1 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland, debuted #2 in Germany, Austria and Sweden. It reached #3 in the UK and the Netherlands, respectively, and had sold over 4 million copies worldwide in it's first two months of release. As with it's two studio predecessors, the album's packaging features minimal credits and no lyric sheet. In the 2012 version of Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", Modern Times was ranked at number 204. When Bob Dylan dropped Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was a rollicking rockabilly and blues record, full of sad songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution. Thus begins the third part of Dylan's renaissance trilogy (thus far, y'all). Modern Times is raw; it feels live, immediate, and in places even shambolic. Rhythms slip, time stretches and turns back on itself, and lyrics are rushed to fit into verses that just won't stop coming. Dylan produced the set himself under his Jack Frost moniker. It's songs are humorous and cryptic, tender and snarling. What's he saying? We don't need to concern ourselves with that any more than we had to Willie Dixon talking about backdoor men or Elmore James dusting his broom. Dylan's blues are primitive and impure.