Bob Dylan - New Morning - Alternate Version (1970)

Here's the third and final album I've made to reorganize the 1970 Bob Dylan recording sessions that resulted in the albums "Self Portrait" and "New Morning." This is an alternate version of the "New Morning" album. It contains every song from that album, in the exact order they appeared on the official version. But every single version here is different than the versions on that album. 

Personally, I think "New Morning" is a great album. All the songs are originals, It has a unified sound, with some consistent themes about living a simple family life, yet there's a lot of diversity in the songs too.

It seems that Dylan was searching for a musical direction in 1970 more than usual, so he often attempted these songs in significantly different versions. Also, we're very lucky that many of these alternate versions have been officially released, making putting together an alternate version like this possible. About half of these versions come from "The Bootleg Series, Volume 10: Another Self Portrait." The other half comes from "Anniversary Collection 1970," which was a very limited release in order to secure legal copyrights in Europe.

Luckily, all there are alternate versions of all but one of the "New Morning" songs. That one exception is "The Man in Me." I wanted to have an alternate version of every song, so I created an "outfake" of that song. Using the sound editing program Spleeter, I removed the bass and drums. I think it sounds okay, enough for me to at least have something for that song.

In several cases, there was more than one good alternate version to choose from. So I picked the one I liked the best, leaning on whichever one sounded more different than the official album version. In some cases, they're stripped down to acoustic versions, but in other cases extra instruments are added.

I've added five alternate versions that I didn't use as bonus tracks at the end. In case you prefer any of these, you could swap them out. Note that I didn't include every single alternate version. For instance, there are about five alternate takes of "If Not for You." But I included all the significant ones. The ones I skipped generally only had minor differences.

In addition to the "New Morning" songs, there are released alternate versions of two songs from 1971 that don't fit well anywhere else, "Wallflower" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece." So I've added those at the end.

01 If Not for You [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
02 Day of the Locusts [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
03 Time Passes Slowly [Alternate Version 2] (Bob Dylan)
04 Went to See the Gypsy [Demo] (Bob Dylan)
05 Winterlude [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
06 If Dogs Run Free [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
07 New Morning [With Horn Overdubs] (Bob Dylan)
08 Sign on the Window [Acoustic Version] (Bob Dylan)
09 One More Weekend [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
10 The Man in Me [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
11 Three Angels [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
12 Father of Night [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
13 Wallflower [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
14 When I Paint My Masterpiece [Demo Version] (Bob Dylan)

If Not for You [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan with George Harrison)
New Morning [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)
Sign on the Window [With Orchestral Overdubs] (Bob Dylan)
Time Passes Slowly [Alternate Version 1] (Bob Dylan)
Went to See the Gypsy [Alternate Version] (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15108300/BobD_1970d_NewMrningAlternate_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I wanted to make something similar to the official "New Morning" cover, but different. That one has a photo of Dylan in the middle that's tinted yellow with a wide band of yellow on the edges, and no text whatsoever. So I did the exact same thing, except I used a sepia tone instead of yellow. And, naturally, I picked a different photo from 1970. I tried adding some text, but I ultimately decided to do without, and keep it more like the official cover.