Earlier today, we told you about a new Bob Dylan song to be featured in the film My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellweger and Forest Whitaker. As it turns out, “Life Is Hard” isn’t the only Dylan composition to be included on the movie’s soundtrack.
According to the official My Own Love Song site (via CoS and Examiner), there are also 16 other previously unreleased pieces of music from Dylan’s Together Through Life sessions in the film’s score (listed below), as well as various other songs from his back catalog.
Watch part of Renée Zellweger’s performance of “Life is Hard” here, and check out the full list of new Bob Dylan compositions in My Own Love Song below:
As we mentioned last year, Bob Dylan’s most recent (non-Christmas) album, Together Through Life, came about after the iconic singer/songwriter became inspired during recording sessions for a soundtrack to the forthcoming Renée Zellweger-starring film My Own Love Song.
It may be a surprise to some that Dylan would agree to contribute new songs to this project, but given that the drama also stars Forest Whitaker, an actor Dylan praised in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, it makes perfect sense. What I didn’t see coming, however, was that Zellweger performs the Dylan-penned song “Life Is Hard” in the film.
Imagine scrolling through your phone’s contact list and finding the poet laureate of rock himself under D for Dylan (or perhaps Z for Zimmerman). That’s what it’s like for Jack White, you see, as the Dead Weather/White Stripes/Raconteurs rocker told the Telegraph this week that he phoned his legendary friend for some advice recently:
I just asked him what songs we should do on this Wanda Jackson album, and he said a couple that were interesting. One of them was his song, Thunder on the Mountain. We tried it, and it was explosive!
With President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill all sitting front-row center at the White House’s relatively intimate East Room, Bob Dylan took the stage at the first “In Performance at the White House” concert of 2010, which was themed “A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”
Whereas gospel singer Yolanda Adams changed the tense in a few lyrics to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” by singing “a change has come” as a shout-out to President Obama’s ‘08 campaign slogan, Dylan’s lyrics to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” didn’t need any, uh, a-changin’. Accompanied by stand-up bass and piano, Dylan sang his 1964 anthem loud and clear, highlighting the song’s many apropos lyrical moments (“Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall”).
His former musical/romantic/protest partner Joan Baez also performed, though the pair did not sing a duet as we had hoped. Baez sang protest classic “We Shall Overcome” with a little help from the crowd for the refrain.
As previously reported, this program will still be broadcast on PBS Thursday night at 8pm EST (I luckily caught the stream online tonight after the live show was rescheduled due to an upcoming snowstorm), as well as on NPR for at least the remainder of the month. **Update: Audio of the performance can be heard here.
“Perhaps the pictures in the Times could no longer be put in rhymes,” Joan Baez sang in 1972’s “To Bobby,” a song which not only begs her former musical/romantic partner Bob Dylan to return to writing the kind of civil rights music (or “protest songs”) that once made him the so-called “voice of a generation,” but also guilts him with a form of social responsibility (“Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby? / They’re crying for you”).
Now forty-seven years after Dylan and Baez sang at the same March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, the pair are performing in the District of Columbia again, not in protest, but for a performance at the White House’s “Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”
As previously reported, Dylan, Smokey Robinson, John Mellencamp, Blind Boys of Alabama, and many other artists will take part in the event, which will be broadcast on PBS this Thursday night (Feb 11), but now, as BroadwayWorld reports, Baez has been added to the lineup as well, turning what was already an historical event for Dylan fanatics like myself into a truly remarkable reminder of the history between that legendary rally and the present.
In addition to PBS’ broadcast and President Obama’s opening remarks to be streamed live on Whitehouse.gov, NPR will air a one-hour concert special throughout the rest of the month that will also be made available online.
Bob Dylan’s Christianity-inspired album Slow Train Coming contains a slew of quotes from and allusions to the Bible, of course, but the most blatant declaration of Dylan’s then-newfound faith was perhaps in his riffing on Genesis 2:20’s line about Adam “naming livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field” in the song “Man Gave Names To All The Animals.” Sounds like a kids book title to me, and Dylan, as well as Sterling Children’s Books, apparently agrees…
In a press release emailed to us, Sterling and artist Jim Arnosky announced the upcoming release of Man Gave Names to All the Animals, a children’s picture book inspired by Dylan’s lyrics and accompanied by a recording of the original song on CD.
“From the first time I heard it, the lyrics created pictures in my mind of a land of primeval beauty,” Arnosky said. “I thought this vision would make a dream of a book, and I asked for Bob Dylan’s permission to make this dream come true. Happily, he said yes.”
Yeah, it almost seems like Dylan always intended the song to be turned into a kids book with these lyrics (e.g. “He saw an animal leavin’ a muddy trail / Real dirty face and a curly tail. / He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big. / Ah, think I’ll call it a pig).
Chicago Sun-Times reports that President and Mrs. Obama have announced the lineup for “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement,” a concert in the White House itself, which will include performances by Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Natalie Cole, Blind Boys of Alabama, Seal, John Mellencamp, and more. Dylan playing “songs from the Civil Rights Movement” for the President and First Lady?! Wait, it gets better.
It isn’t easy to cover a Bob Dylan song without sounding a bit out of place, you know, dressed up in someone else’s clothes, or even worse—like Keanu Reeves doing Shakespeare. Even the simpler songs in Dylan’s canon are lyric-packed, not to mention the varying verse lengths and brilliant, though ultimately distracting, imagery. Long story short, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is a very brave choice, and one which Phoenix pulls off gracefully (embedded below), albeit by truncating Dylan’s epic 65-line ode to his first wife, Sara Lownds.
Frontman Thomas Mars steps out of his normal vocal style a bit for this rendition, channeling Dylan’s drawn-out phrasing and pacing himself brilliantly. I could go on and on, but you’re better off listening before I digress into an imminent Dylan factoid-dropping rant.
Charlotte Gainsbourg took the stage of French TV show Taratata recently, performing live versions of “Heaven Can Wait” (no Beck backup vocals or SpongeBob Squarepants costumes, unfortch) and “Trick Pony” from her new Beck-produced album IRM. Pretty much your typical album release promotional fare.
But then Gainsbourg— who played one of Bob Dylan’s wives opposite Heath Ledger’s Dylan in I’m Not There—offered an intriguing, oddly childlike version of “Just Like a Woman,” which has yet to infect the blogosphere.
With all the hype surrounding belted-out, vocally acrobatic performances from shows like American Idol and the X Factor these days, many are losing touch with the unexplainable, nuanced, and circumstantial (Gainsbourg’s famous father, who introduced her to Dylan’s music, etc.) touches that add magic to some performances. The je ne sais quoi, if you will.
Watch Gainsbourg whisper out Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde hit here or below:
**Update: this performance was removed from YouTube, but here’s Gainsbourg’s live rendition from Brooklyn instead…
Earlier today, we told you about a new Bob Dylan song to be featured in the film My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellweger and Forest Whitaker. As it turns out, “Life Is Hard” isn’t the only Dylan composition to be included on the movie’s soundtrack. 
Imagine scrolling through your phone’s contact list and finding the poet laureate of rock himself under D for Dylan (or perhaps Z for Zimmerman). That’s what it’s like for Jack White, you see, as the Dead Weather/White Stripes/Raconteurs rocker 
With President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill all sitting front-row center at the White House’s relatively intimate East Room, Bob Dylan took the stage at the first “In Performance at the White House” concert of 2010, which was themed “A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”
It isn’t easy to cover a Bob Dylan song without sounding a bit out of place, you know, dressed up in someone else’s clothes, or even worse—like Keanu Reeves 
Charlotte Gainsbourg took the stage of French TV show Taratata recently, performing live versions of 
