Bob Dylan on Sinatra: 'Frank is the mountain you have to climb'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/23/bob-dylan-frank-sinatra-shadows-in-the-night

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Bob Dylan has opened up about Shadows in the Night, dismissing the suggestion that recording an album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra might be risky with the retort: “Risky? Like walking across a field laced with land mines? Or working in a poison gas factory? There’s nothing risky about making records.”

In an interview with AARP the Magazine – a publication for Americans over 50, which boasts of being the world’s largest-circulation magazine – Dylan said he had been thinking of making an album of standards since hearing Willie Nelson’s Stardust in the late 70s. “All through the years, I’ve heard these songs being recorded by other people and I’ve always wanted to do that. And I wondered if anybody else saw it the way I did.”

He said that when recording the songs, Sinatra cast a long shadow. “When you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb, even if you only get part of the way there. And it’s hard to find a song he did not do. He’d be the guy you got to check with. People talk about Frank all the time. He had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you — not at you.”

He spoke of how he had not bought Sinatra records in the 60s, because no one “worshipped” him at the time, but how they were inescapable anyway, and pointed out that while music that people had assumed would be a permanent part of the cultural landscape had disappeared, Sinatra never had.

Earlier this week Dylan revealed a new track from Shadows in the Night, his 36th studio album. Stay With Me, recorded by Sinatra in 1964, has been the closing song at Dylan’s most recent shows.