Chris Willman is another music journalist (in addition to the two mentioned in the previous post) who heard about half a dozen tracks in full from the forthcoming Bob Dylan album, Christmas In The Heart. Click here to read his account in full (thanks to Doug L. for the tip). In addition to providing another very positive take on the music, Willman contributes some info that is new.

Don’t mistake it for a toss-off, in any case; Dylan insiders say his heart really was in it–that he took the project very seriously and did a good deal of recording for it, spontaneous as it might sound. (It’s worth a side note to mention that this is the first time he’s ever publicly aligned himself with a charitable organization, and his income from it will go directly to Feeding America in the U.S., Crisis UK in England, and the World Food Program in other territories.)

A few weeks ago, a 15-track song list appeared on the Amazon UK site, along with 30-second samples of each track. The sound bites were soon pulled down, and Dylan reps insist that not only were these samples unauthorized and mysterious in origin, but Dylan wasn’t due to finalize the track listing until this Friday. There was even some speculation that he might change the track list at the last minute just to spite whoever was responsible for the Amazon UK leak.

Amazon seems so dominant and so pervasive that one tends to look at whatever appears there as being authoritative and “official”. It’s hard to understand how a track listing and 30-second samples could just mysteriously show up there … but I’m not going to lose any sleep in wondering about it. Even harder to conceive of, however, is that the track listing is not actually being finalized until today! The album is going to available for download (at least to Citibank customers) as of this Tuesday — four days from now! And if the track listing has not been finalized for the October 13 official release, that means that no actual CDs have been manufactured and no covers have been printed. And they still have to be shipped and in the stores (to the extent there are stores anymore) in just eleven days! And in the warehouses of the online retailers at least a day before that.

I suppose this kind of timeline can be pulled off today, with the technology and methods available, but it sure boggles my twentieth-century (or perhaps nineteenth-century) brain.

It also needs to be said, unfortunately, that a lot of people are going to be seriously bummed out if we end up getting something less than the fifteen tracks we’ve been expecting. (Please, Santa!)

Another note from Willman’s piece is this: “Dylan insiders say his heart really was in it–that he took the project very seriously and did a good deal of recording for it, spontaneous as it might sound.” That was already clear enough to me on hearing the clips. It takes work to get things to sound like that. It’s not just a question of going into a studio with some guys and some libations and improvising. This was very much making a record, as opposed to just recording some songs and letting them inspire their own atmosphere. The sounds and the textures had to be just so. No producer has been mentioned, so at this point I guess that we’re presuming it was Bob “Jack Frost” Dylan himself. If so, it was a lot of work, and, on the evidence so far, quite an achievement.

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