Today marks the 75th birthday of iconic American singer songwriter, Bob Dylan, who was born May 24, 1941. No word on how he plans to celebrate today, but the world is certainly celebrating in his honor. Check out some of the Dylan-based tributes and projects cropping up today.
Videos by American Songwriter
Animal Collective’s Deakin and Geologist have released a remix of the Dylan Classic “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” incorporating Dylan’s original guitar with ambient, electronic sounds. Listen below.
Meanwhile, in Nashville, tickets are selling out for DylanFest at the Ryman Auditorium, with a stellar lineup of artists covering Dylan’s hits, such as Emmylou Harris, Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Kurt Vile, Boz Scaggs, Moon Taxi, Langhorne Slim, Kesha and more. Benefitting Thistle Farms, an organization dedicating to empowering and healing women survivors of abuse, addiction, trafficking and prostitution, DylanFest concludes tonight.
Get last minute tickets here. The concert can also be streamed live here via AOL Live.
This week’s homage to Dylan is prevalent internationally, too. On Saturday, University of Limerick professor Joseph O’Connor published an open letter through the The Irish Times, thanking Dylan for his massive contribution to music and pop culture.
“You took the musics of immigrant America, the ballads, the blues, the rambles of Woody Guthrie and The Clancy Brothers and Dominic Behan, the cadences of gospel, the imagery of William Blake and Bessie Smith, the amphetamine-fuelled poetry of bebop Greenwich Village and the windblown mournfulness of the lonesome prairie, and fired them in the kiln of the most extraordinary single imagination ever to work in popular music,” O’Connor wrote.
Dylan, who released his latest album, Fallen Angels, four days ago via Columbia, plans to embark on a U.S. tour in early June. On Fallen Angels, as on previous record Shadows in the Night, Dylan reinterprets Frank Sinatra classics. Check out tour dates on Dylan’s official website.
Revisit some of our coverage of Dylan’s songwriting over the past several years:
Lyric Of The Week: Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell”
Measure for Measure: The Alchemy of Bob Dylan
Lyric Of The Week: Bob Dylan, “Ballad In Plain D”
The 30 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs: #21, “Hurricane”
Top 10 Performances from Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) The Bootleg Series Vol. 10
