“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey…It is not life but its shadow. It is not motion but its soundless spectre…”

That’s Maxim Gorky, writing in the summer of 1896, after seeing moving pictures for the first time, via the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe, an invention then only months old. Gorky’s haunting account is remarkable both for its sardonic prescience – he speculates that the Lumières’ innocent demonstration films of trains and happy families will soon give way to vice and violence – and its sheer immediacy; impressions from a world not yet deluged by images on screens.

Who knows how Bob Dylan chooses titles? When his “Exclusive Broadcast Event” Shadow Kingdom was announced in June 2021, sleuths suggested he might have named it after a 1929 story by Conan creator Robert E Howard; a weirdly plausible proposition once you consider that pulp-fantasy tale’s themes of masks, illusion and slippery identity – all elements at play in Dylan’s online show, sometimes in ways that only became clear afterwards. Equally, when you bear in mind the startling reference Dylan once dropped amid the epic, small-scale sprawl of “Brownsville Girl,” it’s hard not to think that the shadows of Plato’s Cave flicker at the edges of the phrase.

But Gorky’s flickering ghostworld seems just as valid a reference. When Shadow Kingdom arrived that July 18, a livestream originally available only for a few days, the preceding months of lockdown meant images onscreen had supplanted much of life. Dylan’s restless touring had been halted. It remained uncertain whether gigs would ever happen in the same way again. Indeed, with no information leaking beforehand, many assumed this would be a virtual live concert to compensate, perhaps showcasing his recent, unperformed, Rough And Rowdy Ways album.

Instead, hooking up with director Alma Har’el, Dylan unveiled a strange, spectral cinematic spectacle that dug into his past to make it new, yet again. Accompanied by a band of relatively young players in COVID-age facemasks, Dylan, who had just turned 80, presented a selection of what were dubbed his “Early Songs” in the stylised setting of a phantom throwback juke joint which, as the party unfolded, increasingly gave off a feeling that the world was ending outside; a hazy roadhouse of the soul, simultaneously frozen in time and floating outside of time, where Dylan, his songs, and a curiously disinterested audience of wraithlike chainsmokers had found refuge, or purgatory.

Composed in glowing black-and-white, the film echoed the endless greys that unsettled Gorky. The difference, of course, was that Gorky’s Kingdom of Shadows was a silent place, where Shadow Kingdom vibrated magnificently with music. Except, it turned out, Dylan’s film was secretly silent, too.

From the first impish harmonica toots of “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” recast as a riverboat shuffle, it was clear the songs had been recorded beforehand and Dylan and the group were miming to playback for the camera. More surprising was the suggestion that emerged following the broadcast: that none of the band seen onscreen – Alexander Burke, Janie Cowan, Joshua Crumbly, Shahzad Ismaily and Buck Meek, accomplished musicians all – actually played any of the music heard, and the real band remained hidden in the shadows beyond.

The Shadow Kingdom film remains glorious: spooky, sharp and sly, with the poignant undertow generated from watching this defiant 80-year-old revisit songs he wrote as a much younger man, surrounded by players who could be his masked children or grandchildren; a feeling most potent during the stately, filigree-fine pop reading of “Forever Young.”

However, the release of its “soundtrack” album, divorced from the performance art shadowplay and demanding a deeper focus on the real life of the music, raises the notion that the Shadow Kingdom film was perhaps, in part, a mask itself – an artful piece of misdirection, drawing attention away from the fact that, here, Dylan has made one of his most fascinating and chancy studio albums: a new LP sacrilegiously reworking songs from some of the most hallowed corners of his career.

Scant information has been offered about the recordings, but the speculation is that the Shadow Kingdom sessions grew organically from the project Dylan worked on with T-Bone Burnett in early 2021 to launch Burnett’s new physical format, Ionic Original, the undertaking that resulted in the one-off disc of a newly-cut “Blowin’ In The Wind” being auctioned at Christies for £1.5 million.

But Dylan had been toying with the idea of re-recording his old songs for years. In 2004, he mentioned it to Newsweek, discussing his desire to redo them “with the proper structures. A lot of these songs can have, like, a dozen different structures to them. I can’t hope to do all that. But I can provide a few things for future generations.”

After re-recording a handful of classics for Ionic Original, he kept rolling. Further sessions followed with a similar set-up, the same engineer, and a shadow band believed to include veteran Dylan associates Burnett and Don Was, guitarists Tim Pierce and Ira Ingber (who himself last recorded with Dylan in the mid-80s, playing on “Brownsville Girl” itself), multi-instrumentalist Greg Leisz, and Nashville accordion ace Jeff Taylor.

Whoever’s playing – there are no credits on the sleeve – close your eyes and drop the needle on Shadow Kingdom as an album, and it becomes clear the biggest shadow over its evening-shadows sound is cast by Dylan’s own Shadows In The Night, the LP with which he commenced his deep immersion in the standards of the pre-rock’n’roll era, and, in the process, found new focus in his singing. The instrumentation is different, rootsier – and Shadow Kingdom’s signature is the absence of percussion – but the resolutely old-school approach is the same: musicians gathered close together in the moment, cutting live, communicating, “mixing” levels not via multitrack console, but by their physical proximity to the few mics capturing the sound. Accepting small errors if the emotional feel is right.

Turning the American Songbook to pages he wrote himself, Dylan, in terrific voice, lays out these old songs with care similar to that he displayed for the work of Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. But where the standards albums cast him as passionate curator, here, as owner of the material, the white gloves can come off, and he allows a rougher sense of mischief: that spry “Masterpiece”; a clattery, almost comically urgent “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”; and, especially the revamped “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” pounding in on the 60s go-go riff of Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right.” Similarly, “To Be Alone With You” and a tumbling, spiky “Watching The River Flow” are extensively re-written from age’s wry perspective. “Wish I was back in the city in my true love’s arms, she likes older men” Dylan sings on the latter, before conceding, “People disappearing everywhere you look…”

Elsewhere, more sober moods are conjured. Clear-cut against a haze of accordion, “Queen Jane Approximately,” is fragile, fond, seriously gorgeous; “Tombstone Blues,” finds Dylan declaiming verses with an attitude both whimsical and menacing; “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” lingers and yearns in its own haunting ambience. The mysterious little closing instrumental, “Sierra’s Theme,” featured in a longer cut than the original broadcast, shivers perpetually on the edge of resolving into Sam Peckinpah’s remake of “All Along The Watchtower”.

A tense, showstopping “What Was It You Wanted” is perhaps the most ominous, deepest cut of all, a song drifting up through smoke from the valley below. Drawn from 1989’s Oh Mercy, it’s the most recent of these “Early Songs,” dating from a mere 27 years into Dylan’s recording career, underlining that 34 more have passed since then.

One of Shadow Kingdom’s achievements is to tie all that time together. It put these old songs in communion with the sound of 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways, and it bled on into the ongoing tour of the same name Dylan commenced as soon as circumstances allowed in late 2021. “Watching The River Flow”, “Masterpiece”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way”, “To Be Alone With You” and “I’ll Be Your Baby” all became part of the R&RW tour’s setlist, but, of course, as the live shows progressed, were soon already shifting shape once again, as Dylan found yet more structures to them.

Shadow Kingdom subtly stresses that Dylan’s songs will continue to be reborn and stay the same as long he’s around to breathe life into them. Their real life happens out there, on the move, in the moment; the recordings are just the shadows he casts along the road. Still, being able to grab these shadows and take them home remains magical. Eyes open, or eyes closed, this is a beautiful record.

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