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Jakob Dylan Gets Help on New Album from T Bone Burnett, Neko Case

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Songwriting can be viewed as a sort of alchemy, a process through which a musician creates something rare and valuable -- whether personally, artistically or commercially -- out of the base materials of everyday life.

Jakob Dylan's forthcoming album, Women and Country, is a glittering example, something that began with only the slightest shred of raw material, in this case, one unrecorded song he'd written, not for himself, but with Glen Campbell in mind. After Dylan played it for producer and longtime family friend T Bone Burnett, Burnett challenged him to write more in the same vein, and what Dylan came back with immediately struck Burnett as something like gold ore.

I do believe its absolutely the best batch of songs hes ever brought to me to listen to, Burnett said earlier this week. I felt when he played me that first song that he had taken a giant step. These aesthetic moments are undefinable, but the song reached me... It just rang that bell.

With Jakob, its been like the sculptor who knocks away everything that didn't need to be there. I think Jakob knocked away everything that was unnecessary and got to the core of what he does, Burnett said. Its exciting, it was fast to work on, we did it all live, he was singing and playing, he wrote the songs in two to three weeks. That explosion of creativity, you can feel it.

Burnett suggested female harmonies were called for on several of the songs, and turned to Neko Case, who'd never worked with Dylan before, and Kelly Hogan, who ended up singing with Dylan on several of the tracks. They just appeared with him at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, and will be backing him on a tour that reaches the Wiltern on May 13.

I was definitely a fan of Wallflowers, Case said in a separate interview. I always liked Jakobs voice, and hes a very good songwriter without being showy. He wasn't coming out the gate all crazy. He has such beautiful control over what hes doing, and I enjoyed a lot of the sounds in Wallflowers music, because it had stuff in common with music I was doing at the time, which was super unpopular.

T Bone asked me to do it and then he sent me the music. The first song I heard was Down on Our Own Shield, and I was so drawn to it, I was so in love with that song. I was finally able to listen to the rest of them, but it took some time, because what I do when I hear something I like, I just repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Then I realized the rest were really awesome too."

The album features Burnett's stable of players, including guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Dennis Crouch, steel guitarist Greg Leisz and drummer Jay Bellerose. Many of them also played on the multiple Grammy-winning Robert Plant-Alison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand, with which Dylan's album shares something of the same sense of mystery and deep spirituality drenched in rootsy rock-folk-country atmospherics. (Burnett recently said there wont be a sequel to Raising Sand: They just hit a wall somewhere, and that's about it, he said by way of explanation.)

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