Taylor swift

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes

When Dylan went folk

For all the billions Taylor Swift has made from guiding her career into carefully delineated “eras,” it was Bob Dylan who pioneered this career path. With practically every new album, Dylan traded one persona for another. There’s the folkie hobo of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the pill-popping beat poet of Blonde on Blonde, the cleaned-up country crooner of Nashville Skyline, the Christian revivalist of Slow Train Coming and many, many others. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, a tranche of previously unreleased hoedowns, goof-offs, shaggy-dog stories and barroom ballads that was never meant to be a proper album, but might be the closest we can get to seeing the man behind

bob dylan