As a longtime coordinator and media representative for Dylan Days, the annual arts and music event in Bob Dylan’s Iron Range hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, I’m used to receiving oddities in the mail. For instance, there was this notice about a new rock opera album being released featuring Bob Dylan music.
The band, Diva De Lai, appears to be an Israeli group planning an Oct. 22 release of their album Dylan at the Opera.
Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), the first single,was written by Dylan in the 1970’s and is a dark and depressing song that at the time was not understood. Though the original is simple, the lyric-heavy folk song was perfectly translated into a dramatic rock, opera sound that Shifrin captures in the cover.
With her powerful delivery throughout the song, Shifrin executes the song’s messages on point. “Señor is about lack of hope, the rule of a tyrant, cruelty, lost love and maybe looking for an answer in a heavenly entity,” Nachtom states.
“If we imagine that Señor is the name or nick name of a woman, then one can see here a dirge for a lost love – for a woman who walked away. The color of the lyrics and the melody present a challenge and are a natural basis for hard-core opera.”
Diva De Lai is the kind of band that would mention that their drummer has a Ph.D. in Economics right there in the press release. This reminded me of the time I saw a “social consciousness” rock band play at UW-Superior. Heavy electric guitars and drums, but the singer’s songs were all about injustice. I remember the singer opened a song at one point with, “Here’s a song I wrote when I was getting my master’s degree at the University of Iowa” followed by an ’80s-style guitar power chord.
Anyway, that’s my baggage on this. Maybe you’ll enjoy the Bob Dylan Rock Opera, or at least the Keynesian deployment of face-melting arias and drums.
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