ALBUM REVIEWS
Chrissie Hynde proved the bona fides of her Bob Dylan fandom decades ago. She sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with him onstage at Wembley Stadium in ’84 and serenaded him with her own jaw-dropping, gospel-tinged rendition of “I Shall Be Released” at his 30th anniversary concert in ’91. She’s vouched for his born-again years, belting “Property of Jesus” on her solo tours, and she slipped his lilting secular favorite “Forever Young” into the Pretenders’ set list only a few years ago. So an album like Standing in the Doorway, which collects nine Dylan cover songs, must have felt like second nature to her.
The project came together last year after Dylan surprise-released a couple of songs, “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes,” in the early months of lockdown. These songs reminded Hynde of the impact his music has had on her formative years, and they moved her to select some of her favorite Dylan songs and record them with the Pretenders’ lead guitarist James Walbourne as a “lockdown series” of YouTube videos. But rather than reinterpret “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” like masters of warhorses, the pair opted for less obvious fare, including many recordings Dylan made in the early Eighties, allowing Hynde a wider berth to fit them to her voice and character.
On “Sweetheart Like You,” an understated and somewhat sexist song off Dylan’s 1983 LP Infidels, Hynde sings the following lyric plainly as written — “You know a woman like you should be at home, that’s where you belong” — but manages to play up the schmaltz of the chorus, “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?” showing she has the upper hand. She also gets the inherent humor of Infidels’ “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” a gorgeously selfish love song on which she sings, “Don’t fall apart on me tonight, I just don’t think I can handle it,” in a way to make whoever the song is directed at clean up his act so as not to bother her. She and Walbourne even gave the song an easy, gospel-rock vibe in place of Dylan’s Sly & Robbie–driven reggae rhythms, which fits the way she handles the patter better than a straight cover.
When she approaches the breakup drama of Blood on the Tracks’ “You’re a Big Girl Now,” she replaces the jazziness of the original with Stonesy acoustic guitar and sings the lyrics with knowing sarcasm. Even better, her “whoooaa” breaks in the chorus sound sultry rather than pained, the way Dylan sang them, and she replaces the harmonica solo with church organ.
Her take on “Standing in the Doorway,” a moody standout from Dylan’s 1997 comeback Time Out of Mind, retains the ethereal, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” throwback vibe of Dylan’s recording but on her own terms. She draws a deep breath before singing, “You left me standing in the doorway crying under the midnight moon,” in a way that shows true apprehension, and her personal expression heightens the cover. And it’s the way she parses the words of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” and lines like “If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all,” with just a backdrop of acoustic guitar and woodwinds in a way that makes it a fitting lockdown anthem.
The best rendition here is “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan’s brooding Infidels outtake, which ties America’s history of slavery with America’s music, the blues. Walbourne plays piano, harmonium, acoustic guitar, and mandolin on the track in a way that captures the seriousness of the song without letting it drift into melodrama, while Hynde deftly navigates the horror of the vocals with a voice that falls somewhere between weeping and sighing. It’s also one of the prettiest recordings she’s ever made.
What’s most striking about Standing in the Doorway is how easy the recordings came to Hynde and Walbourne. The Pretenders have always been underrated covers artists, going back to their first single, a cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” and Hynde has always had a rare knack for figuring out what she has in common with the soul of song and playing that up. When you add in the fact that she and Walbourne had a little extra time to make the record during lockdown, that they realized that tomorrow didn’t have to be so much of a long time and that they could find comfort in Dylan’s works, it seems Dylan was right: lonesome means nothing at all.
When Angel Olsen runs out of space in a notebook, she doesn’t immediately buy a fresh pad; instead, she crams her latest thoughts next to her old grocery lists in the middle. It feels like less pressure to begin in media res—somewhere between the milk and the onions—than to start with a “hello, it’s me again.”
For Olsen, another album is a fresh notepad; an EP a transitional phase tucked in the margins. Since the release of her debut album in 2012, Olsen has found various ways to ease the stakes between major releases, popping her head back in without having to reintroduce herself entirely. In 2017, that took the form of Phases, a 12-track catalog of discarded songs and covers; in 2021, Aisles, a wilfully frivolous bunch of ’80s covers. With her latest album, 2022’s Big Time, in the rearview (alongside its companion EP, 2023’s Forever Means), we now have another Olsen interregnum: Cosmic Waves Volume 1, her debut compilation series. It features two halves: Side A, a selection of original songs from a range of under-the-radar artists, as curated by Olsen; Side B, Olsen’s own take on a song from each of the featured artists.
Cosmic Waves is a bolder experiment than any of her previous interstitial releases, though it’s consistent with Olsen’s career-long fascination with the act of interpretation. In Olsen’s music, love is a constant act of projection and analysis—so when the love fades, so too does the ability to read the other. “Now it’s impossible to conceive/I don’t know who can see you,” she sang on Big Time’s opening song. Cosmic Waves is, too, an act of love, reinterpreting the very act of reinterpretation. Since the project is organized around promoting lesser-known artists, its cover songs become a medium not of association but of loving introduction.
However, with Olsen’s name hanging over the compilation, it’s a struggle to hear each artist on their own terms, and the act of comparison inevitably creeps in. It’s almost irresistible not to hear each of the songs on Side A filtered through an Olsen-like rubric: In Poppy Jean Crawford, there’s Olsen’s barreling cadence and winsome vocalizations; in Coffin Prick, the prismatic light show of Olsen’s synthier moments. These two bombastic tracks are sharply followed by three slow, twilit ballads, and listening to them together feels like eating a chocolate cookie where all the chunks are lumped together on one side. But if any of the tracks demand to stand out on its own, it’s the heavy-lidded romance of Sarah Grace White’s “Ride,” a song of spartan yet swoonsome melodies that cast a contrast against the busy arrangements of the other songs. Among the artists, White comes closest to Olsen’s singularity, though that’s exactly what Olsen tries to conceal in the second half.
Throughout the covers, Olsen’s voice is an instrument consistently detached from her own body. It sounds as though it didn’t come from her throat, but from a little lamp in the room: a small flicker. On “The Takeover” she sings in an archly beautiful style, leaning into a light-headed voice and seldom landing on the plosive consonants that would make the delivery recognizably Olsen. If anything’s identifiably Olsen in these songs, it’s how she appears to be mimicking the recording techniques of her earliest releases: the kelpy reverb, the skittish strums of her simple guitar chords, the overall indirectness. There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing. On “Sinkhole,” she sings in a register halfway back to herself—but just when you think she’s about to land on an Olsenism, she goes back skyward into sweet impersonality. For now, Olsen is still hovering somewhere above or between, yet to add “notepad” to her grocery list.
