Bob Dylan Releasing Music From ‘Shadow Kingdom’ Film as an Album in June
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Bob Dylan made a performance film, “Shadow Kingdom,” that streamed via the Veeps platform for one week in July 2021, Variety reviewed the special, writing that it had “new arrangements so good that pretty much everybody who was watching Sunday was clamoring for a soundtrack to the event, preferably on LP.” That wish is coming true, two years later. (But not just on vinyl.) The music from “Shadow Kingdom” will be released in album form in June.
The album version shall be released June 6 on streaming platforms and as a CD and double-LP. The film itself, out of circulation since that initial one-week pay-per-view window, will become available for rental and download for the first time in June, as well.
A single from the album, “Watching the River Flow,” is out on DSPs now. The original version is a one-off single from 1971 that is somewhat obscure — not to Dylanologists, of course, but probably to most rank-and-file listeners, at least compared to the mostly more familiar ’60s, ’70s and ’80s material that makes up the rest of the set.
The track list includes all 13 songs that were in the film, along with the instrumental that closed it out, now identified as “Sierra’s Theme.” In July 2021, with very few expectations from the Dylan camp of what the pandemic-era show would entail, it was subtitled “The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.” Variety reviewed the stream (“Bob Dylan Gets Smoke in His Eyes, but Not So Much in His Excellent Vocals, in Lynch-esque ‘Shadow Kingdom’”), saying: “The 50-minute performance special was set in a fictional, stylized nightclub, possibly in the 1940s or ’50s or just a timeless twilight zone, where every single person in the tiny audience,
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