VARIOUS ARTISTS : I'M NOT THERE (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK)

Disc One (79:36)

1. All Along the Watchtower (Eddie Vedder and The Million Dollar Bashers)
2. I'm Not There (Sonic Youth)
3. Goin' to Acapulco (Jim James and Calexico)
4. Tombstone Blues (Richie Havens)
5. Ballad of a Thin Man (Stephen Malkmus and The Million Dollar Bashers)
6. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Cat Power)
7. Pressing On (John Doe)
8. 4th Time Around (Yo La Tengo and Buckwheat Zydeco)
9. Dark Eyes (Iron & Wine and Calexico)
10. Highway 61 Revisited (Karen O and The Million Dollar Bashers)
11. One More Cup of Coffee (Roger McGuinn and Calexico)
12. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Mason Jennings)
13. Billy 1 (Los Lobos)
14. Simple Twist of Fate (Jeff Tweedy)
15. Man in the Long Black Coat (Mark Lanegan)
16. Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) (Willie Nelson and Calexico)

Disc Two (79:27)

1. As I Went Out One Morning (Mira Billotte)
2. Can't Leave Her Behind (Stephen Malkmus and Lee Ranaldo)
3. Ring Them Bells (Sufjan Stevens)
4. Just Like a Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Calexico)
5. Mama You've Been on My Mind / A Fraction of Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie (Jack Johnson)
6. I Wanna Be Your Lover (Yo La Tengo)
7. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová)
8. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window ? (The Hold Steady)
9. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Ramblin' Jack Elliott)
10. The Wicked Messenger (The Black Keys)
11. Cold Irons Bound (Tom Verlaine & The Million Dollar Bashers)
12. The Times They Are a-Changin' (Mason Jennings)
13. Maggie's Farm (Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers)
14. When the Ship Comes In (Marcus Carl Franklin)
15. The Moonshiner (Bob Forrest)
16. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine (John Doe)
17. Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Antony and the Johnsons)
18. I'm Not There (Bob Dylan and The Band)

Label : Columbia

Release Year : 2007

Review (AllMusic) : For his impressionistic 2007 Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes hired an army of six actors to portray the singer/songwriter, each thespian representing a different phase or public persona of Dylan's career. The accompanying double-disc soundtrack - not all of its 34 songs are used in the film - employs a similar conceit, as Haynes and his music supervisors, Randall Poster and Jim Dunbar, rounded up rockers and folksingers of all stripes to reinterpret and re-create portions of Dylan's immense catalog. Taken as a whole, neither the singers nor the selections are too conventional, as the album alternates between standards and obscurities, old cohorts and new blood, faithful renditions and original interpretations, never tipping too far in either direction or staying in one place too long. Despite that shifting mood, I'm Not There gels as an album, partially because a good portion of the soundtrack is recorded with one of two different house bands: the dusty, cinematic Arizona outfit Calexico and the Million Dollar Bashers, a supergroup assembled for this gig featuring guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Tom Verlaine, Dylan's regular bassist Tony Garnier, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, guitarist Smokey Hormel, and organist John Medeski. Haynes also used a similar house band on his previous rock & roll film, the glam rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine and, as a soundtrack, I'm Not There is equally as good, if not quite as risky or flashy as that 1998 gem. That's partly due to the inspiration, of course: on Velvet Goldmine he got to play with the history of a lot of groups, all known for their extravagant flamboyance, but here he only has one artist, but if any musician has a history as rich as a battalion of bands, it's Bob Dylan. Haynes, Poster, Dunbar and crew concentrate heavily on the '60s - the film, after all, is grounded in the '60s, pulling in elements of Dylan's life in the '70s and beyond, including his born-again Christianity and Rolling Thunder outlaw stance, but never quite straying from that foundation - and the soundtrack touches upon all of Bob's '60s incarnations, including the folk troubadour, thin wild mercury music, the ragged Americana of The Basement Tapes, and the reflective country-folk of John Wesley Harding. Familiar sounds may be here, but not necessarily familiar songs - Haynes, Poster and Dunbar deliberately sidestep standards like Blowin' in the Wind, Masters of War, Subterranean Homesick Blues, and Like a Rolling Stone, choosing instead to build this soundtrack around songs that weren't widely released during the '60s, later to surface on The Basement Tapes, Biograph, The Bootleg Series, during the film of No Direction Home, or, in the case of the heavily bootlegged title song, released here for the first time. Some could carp that this doesn't quite make for an accurate picture of Bob - it ever so slightly continually circles back to the stark, spooky melancholy of Dylan and the Band's I'm Not There, which ends the album - but it's not inaccurate, either. Rather, it's an interpretation of Dylan's music, emphasizing certain elements and blurring others to paint a portrait where the traditional bleeds into the contemporary and vice versa. Any Dylanologist could spend hours deconstructing the soundtrack to I'm Not There - what is selected and why, why certain songs are reinterpreted while others are left alone - but that's a side benefit to an album that should be enjoyed first as simply an absorbing, entertaining listen. Poster and Dunbar have paired performers with the songs almost perfectly, alternating between subtle surprises and sure picks. No other band could duplicate the haunted quality of Dylan's I'm Not There, but Sonic Youth is the ideal match, as they give the song a hazy beauty and a warmth lacking in the original. Sonic Youth's masterful reading is less of a surprise than how Roger McGuinn and Willie Nelson effortlessly blend in with Calexico on One More Cup of Coffee and Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), respectively, giving these songs arrangements that expand on the originals, just like how Ramblin' Jack Elliott's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues takes the Highway 61 Revisited standard and stripes it down to its essence. John Doe gives I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine a subdued, soulful passion that contrasts with both Sufjan Stevens' twee-ed-up Ring Them Bells and Mark Lanegan's gothic The Man in the Long Black Coat, yet all speak vividly to the spiritual undercurrents in these songs. Despite their gentle version of Just Like a Woman with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Calexico's cuts come the closest to reinventing the song, particularly on an excellent Dark Eyes with Iron & Wine and a good, weary Goin' to Acapulco sung by Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Mason Jennings is responsible for good, straight-ahead versions of the earliest folk songs (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, The Times They Are a Changin'), acquitting himself well, while Once stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova do a joyous You Ain't Goin' Nowhere. All this soft, dreamy folky material helps the harder cuts here - including Cat Power's bluesy Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again - leap out all the more. Usually, this is the province of the Million Dollar Bashers, who when fronted by Stephen Malkmus on Ballad of a Thin Man and Maggie's Farm manage to re-create the snide, hipster spirit of 1965 Dylan. They pull off the same trick with Karen O on a rollicking and faithful Highway 61 Revisited, while Tom Verlaine steps out to the front for a dark, epic Cold Irons Bound, but this house band isn't the only band that rocks hard, either: the Hold Steady blow through Can You Please Crawl out Your Window? and the Black Keys have an heavy, ominous Wicked Messenger (not all that dissimilar to the Faces' version, but decidedly less fun). But no band truly gets to speak to the two extremes of Dylan's work (at least as pictured here) as Yo La Tengo, who have a delicate, beautiful Fourth Time Around and positively nail the wild, careening sound of 1965 on I Wanna be Your Lover. They, alone among any of the artists here, get the opportunity to do these two sides of Dylan, but as I'm Not There definitively proves, there were not just two or even ten sides to Dylan: he contains multitudes. That much is evident on his own recordings, which still have power, but sometimes it takes a fresh perspective to hear what's already there, and the soundtrack to I'm Not There provides that perspective in way few other albums do.