Bob Dylan’s Triplicate is the third album of American standards that Bob Dylan has released in the past two years. It is also three albums long, with 10 songs on each album, for a total runtime of 95 minutes. Dylan, a songwriter whose most enigmatic refrain is that he is less complicated than everyone makes him out to be, has explained that 10 is the number of completion, a lucky number, “symbolic of light.”
In any case, the project brings the total number of hours of Bob Dylan singing American standards to just under three. Like Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, Triplicate leans most heavily on material associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer with whom Dylan has nothing obvious in common other than that fame turned both men into myths. Some of the songs here—“Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” “Stardust”—are well known, at least to the vanishing population of those who care. Most were written in the misty and unremembered days when the singer still went by Robert Zimmerman, a period on which Dylan has staked his entire career.
The arrangements are polished and controlled: guitar, bass, brushed snare drum, the occasional weep of steel guitar. Dylan’s voice is not, and has not been for nearly 50 years, but coming to a Bob Dylan album for vocals is like going to the state fair for the food: Let’s hope you like it fried. In the absence of a crooner’s virtuosity and polish, there’s character, that great unteachable quality that makes even the marginal doodles of a genius flicker with life. Dylan’s voice—gutted but charming, a ghost banging around in the closet looking for a lightswitch—sounds best on the album’s mid- and uptempo songs, where it carries wisdom and resilience and light, imbuing received wisdom with the bittersweetness of lived experience.
The ballads, beautiful as they are, sometimes feel static, bereft of that innerverse opened by singers like Johnny Hartman or, say, Willie Nelson, whose own standards album Stardust remains a high point for projects like this. There seems to be a tempo threshold below which the songs on *Triplicate *become quicksand for Dylan, turning him from an old scamp into a confused puddle of remorse. Call it the difference between just enough and one too many. (At least he’s not maudlin, the cliff over which all ballads peer.) The exceptions—“There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” “But Beautiful”—tend to be songs whose lyrics offer their singers an opportunity to be funny, a quality Dylan continues to not get enough credit for.