“Full Moon and Empty Arms” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has had rather mixed luck with cover albums—he’s put out a couple of decent ones, like Good as I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, but the three albums widely acknowledged as his worst…Self-PortraitDylan, and Christmas In the Heart…all consisted primarily of covers. And while Dylan’s voice has actually improved in his old age…now he just sounds like an extremely grizzled old Blues singer…this song was based on a Rachmaninoff concerto, and I was skeptical of Dylan’s ability to do it vocal justice. But I was pleasantly surprised than Dylan, even in his seventies, can still pull off the soft croon he displayed on such albums as Nashville Skyline, and his voice sounds about as good here as it has in decades. This isn’t remotely on a level with the tracks on Dylan’s last album, Tempest, but it is a perfectly pleasant rendition of a classic song, and given as strange a project as Bob Dylan covering Frank Sinatra, that’s about the best we could have hoped for.

Verdict: Good, surprisingly enough.

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