Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the hoopla surrounding his 80th birthday on 24th May, I've been listening to Bob Dylan a lot recently. Perhaps more surprisingly, a lot of it for the first time. Case in point: Blonde On Blonde, which I listened to in full last month. I have tonnes of Dylan covers, mostly as freebies with the likes of Mojo and Uncut magazines, and including a 50th anniversary cover version of the entire album. However, this was the first time I had heard Dylan's original version of Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands. It's been written about many, many times by writers far more eloquent and prosaic than I, suffice to say that it's a beautiful, epic story that - at the time - Dylan apparently considered to be the best song he'd ever written.
Uncut magazine's recent Dylan tribute CD included a great version by Weyes Blood and the aforementioned Blonde On Blonde Revisited featured an equally languid version by Jim O'Rourke. I've collected them here with a shorter, live acoustic version by French band Phoenix and finish off with Alabama 3, not a cover but a riff on the title and a great closer.
1) Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands: Bob Dylan (1966)
2) Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands: Weyes Blood (2021)
3) Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands (Live & Unplugged for NDR Hörfunk, Hamburg): Phoenix (2009)
4) Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands: Jim O‘Rourke (2016)
5) Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlife (Album Version) (Edit): Alabama 3 (2000)
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