List of 1970s quiet storm songs movie#
List of 1970s quiet storm songs license#

In a fitting touch, a recording of buzzing insects flits in and out of the track. The guitar and percussion are inobtrusive, filling in the gaps between DylanвЂ™s words. The underlying chord structure doesnвЂ™t change from verse to chorus, so it is DylanвЂ™s melodic variations that mark the change between them, accompanied by subtle backing harmonies and an echoing organ. The song is driven by DylanвЂ™s piano-banging out the simple repeating chord progression-and one of his best vocal performances.

Out of this experience was born вЂњDay of the Locusts.вЂќ But academia is a many-tentacled beast, and here it was, trying to claim Dylan as one of its own, again. The story goes that his two companions had to do everything short of kidnapping to get Dylan to comply, which makes sense considering he had dropped out of the University of Minnesota in 1960 and spent the intervening decade becoming-by purpose or accident-a key figure of the counterculture. вЂ“ Kevin Korber вЂњDay of the LocustsвЂќДЇifty years ago, Dylan-disillusioned, out of place, high as hell and paranoid-drove down to Princeton with his wife, Sara, and David Crosby to receive an honorary degree. This is arguably one of the handful of Bob Dylan songs performed better by other artists-IвЂ™m partial to George HarrisonвЂ™s rendition-but that only serves to emphasize just how great of a songwriter Dylan could be. Even as a Dylan original, it has the feeling of the kind of country standards that Dylan was fascinated with at the time, and it essentially became a standard almost immediately after its release. Al KooperвЂ™s organ, typically a dominant force on early Dylan albums, lingers in the background, and greater emphasis is placed on DylanвЂ™s tender (by his standards) vocal delivery. The sense of joy and ecstasy in the song is palpable, and it is only helped by the low-key arrangement of the song itself.

DylanвЂ™s words rely on the sort of common metaphors and descriptors that are commonplace because they work so effectively. The message of вЂњIf Not for YouвЂќ is easy to comprehend itвЂ™s direct in the way that some of the finest folk and country music often is.

List of 1970s quiet storm songs license#

All of this is evident in the romantic inflections of the album opener, вЂњIf Not for You.вЂќ Where previous Dylan love songs allowed for the singer-songwriter to exercise a degree of poetic license in order to craft something singular, вЂњIf Not for YouвЂќ places emotion ahead of arch artistic expression. New Morning was something of a reset, its simple, warm fusion of folk, country and gospel a soothing balm from an artist who was perhaps looking to settle down a bit as he started a new life. вЂ“ Pat PaduaДЄfter essentially changing the face of popular music in the 1960s, DylanвЂ™s 1970s was typified by a desire to return to some sort of simplicity, as evidenced by New Morning, the apologia album that came immediately in the wake of one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage in music history. Today, Dylan may be AmericaвЂ™s elder musical statesman, but he had to make some missteps along the way, and the вЂ70s is when he shifted from unstoppable juggernaut to flawed major artist after conquering the world, he was still trying to find himself, and the search was fascinating.

List of 1970s quiet storm songs movie#

By the end of the decade, as biographer Clinton Heylin notes, Dylan was getting over a failed marriage and the backlash against Street-Legal and Renaldo and Clara, a nearly five-hour movie that has yet to find critical rehabilitation. But, with Self Portrait and a succession of new directions that didnвЂ™t all take, the voice of his generation, after a steep ascension, was ready to fail, and he got some of the worst reviews of his career well into the decade.

Maybe his best work of the decade was largely recorded in the вЂ60s, The Basement Tapes. Several of them, with peaks and valleys and canonical albums and widely dismissed efforts. Stubborn, mercurial, Dylan careened into the new decade with a spotless record and proceeded to grow spots. It worked.ДЄs Another Self Portrait revealed decades later, there was a good album buried in those sessions, but such was the contrariness of the aging boy wonder that, after riding a critical and commercial rocket in the вЂ60s, all he wanted to do was crash land. Dylan later claimed that he was tired of the attention and that Self Portrait was a plot to get people to stop buying his records. His very first review of the decade in Rolling Stone, then still the arbiter of the same counterculture that hailed him a hero, led with an incredulous, вЂњWhat is this shit?вЂќ After a legendary winning streak that left his early output the gold standard of the вЂ60s-and thus among the most overplayed of the era-he flopped, hard. But in the 1970s, you couldnвЂ™t consistently call Bob Dylan anything for very long. You can call him a crowd-pleaser, you can call him a crank. You can call him mascaraed genius, you can call him Rick. You can call him self-indulgent, you can call him slick.