2009: Christmas in the Heart - Bob Dylan

Who's got a beard that's long and white?

Right towards the end of his excellent history of popular music, Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, Bob Stanley writes that Bob Dylan “has maybe done more to un-bottle the ghosts and magic of old-time music than anyone else in the rock era” (page 588).

Over the course of his long career, Dylan has covered and uncovered songs and singers from just about every genre and every time period. He’s sung songs from the Great American Songbook made most popular by Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin and he’s sung country classics and Appalachian mountain ballads. He’s been singing the blues and he’s preached the good gospel. He’s rocked and rolled all the way down to the pit and he’s sung in Spanish and Italian at times, elsewhere. He invented the singer-songwriter genre and then covered his contemporaries like George Harrison, Gordon Lightfoot, Warren Zevon, Neil Young and John Prine, as well as pop singers like Bobby Vee and Charles Aznavour. He’s done whatever the hell he was doing on his cover of Kris Kristofferson’s They Killed Him on Knocked Out Loaded, and, of course, he has sung a never ending supply of traditional folk songs and ballads, too.

His first album was mainly made up of such folk and blues standards, and in the 90s he released two further folk covers albums. In between and ever since he has filled his live act with folk songs, too.

When it was announced that he’d been in the studio recording Christmas in the Heart in the summer of 2009, there was a lot of disbelief and shock around that Dylan would do such a thing. But Christmas songs are really just the ultimate folk songs; passed down from one generation to the next, communally learned, shared and revelled in and tweaked or adapted over time, and so, in it’s way, Christmas in the Heart is really just Dylan’s ultimate folk album, and one that we should have expected from him all along. He’s sung just about every other folk song out there at some point or another, anyway!

He is certainly just as committed to the songs and performance here as he is anywhere on Good As I Been to You or World Gone Wrong, and the arrangements on the album from his road band - with plenty of additional festive augmentation from players like Phil Upchurch, David Hidalgo and Patrick Warren - are wonderful. Magical, even.

A lot of what Dylan did in the 60s or even on albums like “Love and Theft” is drenched in and dripping with irony or double meanings and sleights of hand, but on Christmas in the Heart (as well as later on the Sinatra songbook exploration), the performances are incredibly earnest, touching, warming and honest.

His voice may be cracked and creaking all over this album, but the songs are all the better for it and he sings the hell out of them. These songs are so lived in, from being around for so long and from being sung by so many people, and Dylan’s voice reflects that. He is singing with the ravaged voice of the whole worlds Christmas choir. These are songs that everyone can sing, and that we all sing together, regardless of how good our voices sound or how old we are, or where we’re from. He sings them just like we do, only moreso. When the angelic Andrews Sisters-esque voices of Amanda Barrett, Abby DeWald and Nicole Eva Emery join Dylan on Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, they don’t highlight how far gone Dylan’s own voice is on the album, but highlight just how universal the messages of love, hope, joy and connection in the songs are.

This is a wonderful album. It is so texturally rich and warm that just listening to it feels like sitting by a roaring fire with a loved one and a mulled wine, in a soft fairy-light glow and with the anticipation of presents under the tree and a fragrant meal cooking in the oven. Over the course of the album, the mood cycles through every emotion that you can expect to feel over the festive season: childlike wonder and joy, excitement and expectation, nostalgia, the blues, hope, humour, inebriation, trepidation, wistfulness, gratitude, and best of all, love.

And how about that Must Be Santa music video, which is just such an unbridled joy? It might seem strange to see Dylan let his hair down, but oh what fun it is to watch and sing along with. I love every second of his dancing, prancing, gesticulating, drinking and smirking throughout the clip, and can never see it too many times.

And if all that isn’t enough to put a little Christmas in your Heart, then surely knowing that every sale and stream of the album has a positive effect on people’s lives will. As the ultimate present during the season of giving, Dylan donates all of the earnings from the album to the charities Feeding America (USA), Crisis (UK) and the United Nations' World Food Programme (Rest of the World) in order to help feed those most in need, and find homes for those without them.

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Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope that you have a great holiday season and that whatever you’re doing, and whoever you’re with, you have Christmas in the Heart.

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