Bob Dylan - A New Morning Portrait - Non-Album Tracks (1970)

Yesterday, I posted what I consider the best of the recording sessions that led to Bob Dylan's 1970 "Self Portrait" album. That album was recorded entirely in three days in early March 1970, though some songs from 1969 were included.

The conventional wisdom for many years was that "Self Portrait," an album mostly made up of covers, was such a critical disaster that Dylan quickly returned to the studio and recorded an album of originals, "New Morning," that restored his reputation. But that's not how it actually happened. Nearly all the songs for "New Morning" were recorded in sessions in May and early June 1970, before "Self Portrait' as released later in June. ("New Morning" was released in October 1970.)

Furthermore, the style of the two albums were blurred together. A few of the "New Morning" songs were first recorded in the March sessions, but held back for the next album. More importantly for this album, Dylan's sudden fondness for doing cover versions continued in the "New Morning" sessions. He originally planned on including at least a couple of covers in "New Morning," so a bunch were recorded to see which ones worked the best. In fact, two covers, "Mr. Bojangles" and "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," were selected for inclusion and only dropped at the last minute due to him finishing off a couple more originals.

The result of this is that there's an album's worth of good outtakes from "New Morning," so that's what this album is. The vast majority are covers, though there's one original, "Telephone Wire," and two Dylan originals from the early 1960s done is drastically different arrangements, "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." So what one gets is mainly a sonic continuation of the types of cover songs Dylan did in the "Self Portrait" sessions. I suppose that's not so surprising considering these sessions only took place three and four months later. Thus, I call this album "A New Morning Portrait" because it's like a cross between "New Morning" and "Self Portrait."

These songs were recorded too late for inclusion on "Self Portrait." In 1973, the album "Dylan" was released by one record company after Dylan had switched to a different record company in a spiteful move. Only four songs here are from that: "Mr. Bojangles," "Sarah Jane," "Mary Ann," and "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." Another song, "Bring Me a Little Water," eventually found released on "The Bootleg Series, Volume 10: Another Self Portrait." All the other songs come from "Anniversary Collection 1970," an extremely limited release to retain legal copyrights in Europe. In two cases, I used bootleg versions instead because the "Anniversary Collection 1970" version had a couple of seconds cut off and the sound quality is the same.

Note that the same problem that plagued the "Self Portrait" recordings also happened to many of these here, namely that the producer after the fact sweetened them with unnecessary strings, horns, and backing vocals. So in one case I was able to use alternate versions from those on the 1973 "Dylan"album without the overproduction: "Lily of the West."

There's some speculation that the record company that released "Dylan" in 1973 purposefully picked bad songs and bad versions in an extra bitter and spiteful move. I don't know if that's true, but I don't like some of those songs, and I didn't include any version of them. In some cases, it was exactly what happened with the "Self Portrait" album, where Dylan sang covers that weren't right from him, in part because the famous, excellent versions people were familiar with, for instance "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Big Yellow Taxi."

I made significant edits to three songs. "Your True Love" is a Carl Perkins song done as a rough but fun duet between Dylan and George Harrison. Unfortunately, it seems Harrison wasn't close to a microphone, so his vocals were rather low. I used the sound editing program Spleeter to boost his vocals some. 

I massively changed the song "Long Black Veil." The released version on "Anniversary Collection 1970" is almost seven minutes long, because Dylan and his band played the entire song and then without stopping played the entire song again. So I edited it down to be only one pass through the song (the second one). 

Finally, I originally didn't include the song "Mary Ann" from the "Dylan" album because I thought the backing vocals were too prominent and heavy-handed, ruining the song. But a couple of days after posting this album, I discovered a sound editing program called "X-Minus" that has the ability to remove backing vocals. I used it on "Mary Ann," and ultimately decided to cut the volume of the backing vocals way down, so they're subtle, instead of removing them altogether.

A final note: I moved one song, "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," from my 1971 stray tracks album "Watching the River Flow" to this album. That's because it was recorded during these 1970 sessions, and all the other songs on that album are from 1971, so it fits much better here. So you might want to redownload that album to avoid having the same song on both.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 Telephone Wire (Bob Dylan)
02 Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance [1970 Version] (Bob Dylan)
03 Your True Love [Edit] (Bob Dylan & George Harrison)
04 Matchbox (Bob Dylan with George Harrison)
05 Sarah Jane (Bob Dylan)
06 Alligator Man [Country Version] (Bob Dylan)
07 The Ballad of Ira Hayes (Bob Dylan)
08 Mr. Bojangles (Bob Dylan)
09 Mary Ann [Lowered Backing Vocals Version] [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
10 Jamaica Farewell (Bob Dylan)
11 Long Black Veil [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
12 Bring Me a Little Water (Bob Dylan)
13 Tomorrow Is a Long Time [1970 Version] (Bob Dylan)
14 I Forgot to Remember to Forget (Bob Dylan)
15 Lily of the West (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15107505/BobD_1970b_ANewMrningPortrait_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo was taken in 1970.