Former Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry covers Dylan a lot. His first ever solo single was a Bob Dylan cover. Nearly 35 years later, he released an album of just Dylan covers. Now he’s releasing a 50 year retrospective box-set of his solo career and, fittingly, he’s included a new cover of an old Bob Dylan song.
The song is “She Belongs to Me,” recorded as part of the revolutionary a-side of Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, which broke with how Dylan had previously performed his songs, as well as continuing to move farther away from his protest song origins. But though the original features a full band, it’s not among the most raucous of the new material and is still very much a folk song, even if the lyrics don’t really fit the tradition.
Ferry takes the song at a similar pace but the arrangement is very distinct from Dylan’s original. It’s a little bit like the memory of a ’60s Wall of Sound production, with lots of instruments blending into the background and prominent Spectoresque arrangement. Ferry’s voice itself has an echo on it.
Country arrangements are added for the break to support Ferry’s harmonica solo that link the song a little bit back to its origins. After the break, the arrangement continues to get denser, nearly overwhelming Ferry’s vocal.
It’s certainly not the weirdest Dylan cover of Ferry’s long career nor it is the most conventional. It finds a happy medium between radical revision (of the backing track) and a conventional reading (Ferry’s vocal). It’s a fitting addition to his now storied history as a Dylan interpreter.
