Bob Dylan announces new bootleg box set charting his early career
Bob Dylan has announced details of a new box set, Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963.
The latest collection, which is set for release on October 31st through Columbia/Legacy Recordings, features a total of 139 tracks, including 48 recordings of live performances that have never previously been heard.
Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 is set to be released digitally, as well as editions on 8xCD, 2xCD, and 4xLP. To tease the forthcoming box set, Dylan has shared ‘Rocks And Gravel’, an outtake from his recordings for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
The earliest recording was made in 1956 when Dylan was only 15 years old at Terlinde Music Shop in St Paul, Minnesota. It tracks his career from that moment as a Minnesotan teenager who was known as Robert Zimmerman until he headlined Carnegie Hall in New York eight years later, after making a name for himself as Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village.
It also features a 125-page essay from Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who said of the box set, “Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment.”
Wilentz continued: “Even so, as an aural record of an artist becoming himself—or in Dylan’s case, his first of many artistic selves—the collection aims to collapse time and space, not as a nostalgic reverie but as a living connection between the past and the present, the old and the new, which are never as distinct as we might think.”
A description for the upcoming release says it “tells the story of Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota to the Greenwich Village bohemia in the early 1960s”.
Notable recordings on Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 include cuts from his set at Newport Folk Festival in 1963, as well as ‘Liverpool Gal’, which is an original Dylan composition that has never previously been released.
Later this year, Dylan will return to the UK and Ireland. His tour will begin at the Brighton Centre on November 7th before visiting Wales for three shows in Swansea. Next on his agenda is Leeds for a concert at the First Direct Arena ahead of two nights at the Armadillo in Glasgow.
The legendary singer-songwriter will then take a trip over the Irish Sea to play two shows in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast, before venturing down south to the picturesque Killarney in County Kerry for a pair of concerts. The tour concludes at the 3Arena in Dublin on November 25th.
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