Bob Dylan "New Morning" Album Review

 “New Morning” and the Art of Shrugging: A Review by Marjorie Snint

Snint = Someone Needs Introspective Negative Takes

There’s a peculiar kind of disappointment reserved for albums that are merely good. New Morning (1970) is Bob Dylan’s sonic equivalent of a polite nod—an album that neither offends nor astonishes, but instead settles into the background like a well-behaved guest at a party you forgot you were hosting.

Released in the wake of the critically mauled Self Portrait, New Morning was hailed as a “return to form.” But what form, exactly? The album feels like a series of sketches Dylan forgot to discard—pastoral, piano-heavy, and oddly content. The man who once snarled through Highway 61 Revisited now coos about dogs and mornings with the gentle resignation of someone who’s traded amphetamines for herbal tea.

“Went to see the gypsy / Staying in a big hotel,” he sings, and you can almost hear the room service cart rolling by. The mysticism is diluted, the rebellion domesticated. Even “If Not for You,” later immortalized by George Harrison, feels like Dylan trying on sincerity like a borrowed coat—warm, yes, but not quite his size.

Critics praised the album’s “freshness,” but freshness is not the same as vitality. New Morning is full of pleasant detours that never quite arrive. “Sign on the Window” gestures toward emotional depth (“Build me a cabin in Utah…”) but retreats before the foundation is poured. It’s as if Dylan is testing the waters of normalcy, unsure whether to dive or flee.

Of course, the mythos demands we call this a pivot. A necessary breath. A retreat before the next charge. But I suspect New Morning is less a pivot and more a pause—a shrug disguised as a sunrise. It’s the sound of Dylan not caring what you think, and doing so with just enough charm to make you care anyway.<<

>>Bob Dylan's New Morning: A Triumphant Return to Pastoral Authenticity

By Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III
Senior Art Critic, Pixels & Pretension Quarterly

One approaches Dylan's 1970 opus New Morning not merely as a collection of songs, but as a profound dialectical meditation on the post-industrial condition of the American soul. Here, Dylan—having descended into the Hadean depths of motorcycle accidents and domestic seclusion—emerges as a phoenix of rustic simplicity, a veritable Orpheus returning from the underworld of avant-garde experimentation.

The opening track, "If Not for You," operates on multiple semiotic planes simultaneously. On the surface, a love song; beneath, a Heideggerian exploration of Being-with-Others that would make Sartre weep into his café au lait. The major-key tonality represents nothing less than Dylan's rejection of the chromatic nihilism plaguing lesser artists of the era.

"Day of the Locusts" reveals itself as perhaps the most trenchant critique of academic ceremonialism since Foucault's Discipline and Punish. That Dylan received an honorary doctorate from Princeton only to pen this scathing indictment demonstrates the kind of auto-deconstructive genius that separates the wheat from the chaff, the Dylan from the merely derivative.

The titular track, "New Morning," with its almost embarrassingly joyful imagery of rabbits running and little children singing—this is not naïveté, dear readers, but a conscious reclamation of innocence in the Blakean tradition. Dylan has read his Wordsworth, his Whitman, and emerged with a syncretic vision of American pastoral that rivals Thoreau's Walden in its implications for post-modernity.

Even the lesser-discussed tracks shimmer with meaning upon proper exegesis. "The Man in Me" anticipates Judith Butler's theories of performative identity by a full two decades. "If Dogs Run Free"—often dismissed by philistines as whimsical nonsense—is clearly a jazz-inflected deconstruction of Cartesian dualism.

In conclusion, New Morning stands as an essential text—and I do mean text in the Barthesian sense—for understanding not merely Dylan's oeuvre, but the very trajectory of Western consciousness itself. Future scholars will recognize this album as the precise moment when American folk music achieved what Adorno could only theorize: a reconciliation between high art and popular form.

Rating: ★★★★★ (Five stars, naturally, though such reductive metrics barely scratch the surface of this work's significance)<<