There are rumors, notably reported on this Spanish website, that Bob Dylan is currently recording a new album with producer Rick Rubin. There are actually people who have fun making up these kinds of things, so I have no idea if it’s true or not. On one level it wouldn’t surprise me that Bob were recording again so relatively soon after Modern Times. The way that album entered the charts at number one in the U.S. and many other countries had to be an exhilarating boost for the artist, not to mention his record company. I think everyone would be very pleased to see Bob get off his schedule of one album every four to five years. After all, tempest fugit and all that.

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Not a rumor, apparently, is what’s being billed as a “new Bob Dylan live album,” to be released only in Britain, on March 3rd, and featuring only performances from Dylan that were broadcast on television, such as his “Saturday Night Live” appearances. Interesting, but not exactly the kind of live set that many of his fans are holding out hope for. The fact that it’s only being released in Britain, and apparently not by Columbia but by a label called “Storming Music,” makes one think some kind of gray area is being exploited in terms of the right to reproduce and sell such recordings. And wouldn’t this make a lot more sense as a DVD rather than a CD? Fishy, but there you go.

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Also more than a rumor is the 50 track, 2 CD compilation of songs played on Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” show, which is being released by Ace Records in March.

The compilation represents the vast range of music played on the show, with a song list spanning ‘Papa’s On The Housetop’ by Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell recorded in 1930 to Mary Gauthier’s ‘I Drink’ recorded in 2005. Artists as diverse as The White Stripes, Grandpa Jones, Jerry Butler, The Clash, Memphis Minnie, Bobby Darin, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Modern Lovers, Billie Holiday, George Jones, Bo Diddley, Alton Ellis, Louis Jordan, Santiago Jimenez, James Carr, Gerraint Watkins, Slim Gaillard, Otis Rush and many others sit happily side by side on this highly eclectic collection.

The package, designed by Phil Smee at Waldo’s Design and Dream Emporium, includes a fully illustrated 40-page book packed full of rare photographs and memorabilia alongside detailed notes on each track, by experts in each genre.

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Daniel Lanois is interviewed at Spinner.com, and when asked who are the people he’s learned the most from, he answers:

I’ve sat next to Bob Dylan for a good many months and I’ve watched him hone in on his lyrics. And I watched Bob be quite guarded with his great couplets. And they exist in one song, but if that does not make the finish line he’ll take the good couplet and put it in another song. That was intriguing to me because we are conditioned to believe that songwriters sit down and write a song about a particular subject matter written from a certain angle. But it was nice to see that Bob would deal with the lyrics the same way that I deal with my sonics. I’ll hit on a sound that I think is very special and it will sit in the sonic orphanage, if you like, until it one day it finds a home.

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