In the opening minute of Kurt Elling’s cover of Bob Dylan’s anthem “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” the jazz singer turns the lyrics into a spoken-word sermon. Without any accompaniment, he fully enunciates each line, then pauses, allowing time to process each haunting phrase of Dylan’s prose. He also reconfigures the order of the song, combining the first verse with the fourth, jumping from “I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,” straight to, “I met a young child beside a dead pony.”
Apr 092018