It’s to realign your thinking: Bob Dylan recording standards may not be just a dalliance, but instead a major late-career pivot. Today, the Nobel-Prize-winning singer/songwriter announced his third collection of American Songbook tunes entitled Triplicate, due out on March 31. Why Triplicate? Because his third set of standards is also itself a triple album. Even Rod Stewart, with his four gold American Songbook albums might blush.
It’s been less than a year since Dylan’s second Sinatra-informed standards collection Fallen Angels, but nonetheless, Triplicate will include full 30 new recordings of “classic American songs,” assembled in three “thematically-arranged 10-song [sequences],” according to a post on Dylan’s website. Sinatra fans recall the singer’s own notorious, themed three-disc Trilogy collection from 1980; given Dylan’s tendency to favor Sinatra classics on all three of his standards albums, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that this might be one of Dylan’s points of reference.
You can preorder Triplicate now here. Listen to the pleasant first release from the record, “I Could Have Told You,” a ballad written for Sinatra in the early 1950s via a weird “Vinyl Video” clip.
