On 19 October 1970, Bob Dylan released New Morning, his eleventh studio album, on Columbia Records. It arrived in shops barely four months after Self Portrait, a record that had left critics and fans wondering if the songwriter had lost the plot. The new album's job was simple but brutal: remind people why they had cared in the first place.
An old voice brought back
The key was not a new direction but an old one. New Morning brought back Dylan's familiar nasal voice on every track. For the first time in years, he sang an entire album in the voice people knew. Since John Wesley Harding, he had been pushing his singing into a country manner, softer and less instantly his own.
For the first time in years, he sang an entire album in the voice people knew.
The sessions had a false start that could have derailed everything. Dylan first tried to record three of the songs in March 1970. Then, on 1 May, he began work in Studio B with George Harrison, bassist Charlie Daniels and drummer Russ Kunkel. Those results were rejected. The rejected May recordings did not vanish completely. Later releases surfaced with "Working on a Guru" and alternate versions of "Time Passes Slowly" and "If Not for You." Dylan also tried a session of covers on 1 June, though only Peter La Farge's "Ballad of Ira Hayes" was seriously considered.
A different creative spark had already come from the theatre. Dylan had been writing songs for Scratch, a play by the poet Archibald MacLeish. A clash with the producer over the song "Father of Night" pushed Dylan to leave the project and take his songs with him. Al Kooper, who worked as co-producer, said those pieces became the backbone of New Morning.
Five days in Studio E
By June the album started to take shape. Dylan had written "Three Angels", "If Dogs Run Free", "Winterlude" and "The Man in Me". He moved from Studio B to Studio E, and over five days the bulk of the record was captured. Kooper helped shape an early sequence, though Bob Johnston, the credited producer, was gone by July and never came back. On 9 June 1970, Princeton University awarded Dylan an honorary doctorate in music. The ceremony inspired "Day of the Locusts," a song that mentions the Brood X cicadas present in Princeton that year. David Crosby was there and later said Dylan did not want to attend, and that the line "The man next to me, his head was exploding" referred to him.
The most successful song to emerge was "If Not for You". George Harrison recorded his own version for the album All Things Must Pass. Olivia Newton-John then turned it into an international hit in 1971, carrying a Dylan tune far beyond the usual folk-rock audience. The song proved that even a modest, gentle track from these sessions could travel.
The final session came on 12 August 1970. Dylan re-recorded "If Not for You" and "Time Passes Slowly", and captured "Day of the Locusts". Those three recordings opened the finished album. The work was over, but the process had been draining. Al Kooper said that after the record was done, he did not want to speak to Dylan again. The finished album held twelve songs and ran just over thirty-five minutes. Among them, "Sign on the Window" described family happiness, though guitarist Ron Cornelius remembered that Dylan had a heavy cold while recording it. "Father of Night," an interpretation of the Jewish Amidah prayer, lasted only a minute and a half and became Dylan's shortest studio song.
The commercial response was immediate. New Morning reached number 7 in the United States and went gold quickly. The album received a much warmer reception than Self Portrait.