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Jakob Dylan resurrects The Wallflowers name for his latest album. By Brian Wise
Jakob Dylan is at home in Los Angeles when we catch up online to talk about the new Wallflowers album, Exit Wounds, released in early July. He is about to go out on a twenty-plus date tour that will take the latest rendition of the band through until the end of November. “It’s 73 and sunny, like every other day of the year,” replies Dylan when I ask him what it is like there. Having lived in the city for almost all his life, apart from his first few years in New York and some time in college back there, he adds knowingly, “I haven’t even looked outside but I know that it’s that.” In fact, for several years up to 2019 Jakob had been immersed in one of Los Angeles’ most famous music locations as executive producer, narrator and star in the acclaimed documentary film Echo In The Canyon. The film found Dylan as executive producer, collaborating or interviewing artists such as Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Beck and Fiona Apple as well as being part of the last on-screen appearance by Tom Petty. Dylan, was a logical choice as the focus for the film with his obvious feel for the music and his father’s affiliation with many of the artists. “It was unexpected that it would take so long, to be honest but it kept me busy,” notes Dylan. “When you do a documentary, there isn’t a script really. It just unfolds depending on where you go and the interviews you get. So, it just went on and on. There’s not a lot of easy interviews to assemble one after the other. You can’t tell Brian Wilson and Eric Clapton when to be somewhere to film. You’ve just got to wait until they’re available and then there might be three months in between interviews. You just have to be patient.” It’s lucky Dylan restricted the timeframe from 1965 to 1968, otherwise it could have been like a Ken Burns series. In fact, there is another twopart series, Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time directed by Allison Ellwood, that takes up the story into the ‘70s. “Well, if you wanted to make a complete documentary about Laurel Canyon, Ken Burns should do that because it would be a long series,”
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agrees Dylan. “Ours was just really ‘65 and the bands there. I know some people were confused. Where was Joni Mitchell? Where was Frank Zappa? Where were The Doors? But that was never our purpose of the documentary. It’s an interesting time. It was just important that we really narrow it down to something specific. I suggest that he could have equally made a film about another era that threw up a lot of bands he listened to and saw in his teenage years such as Los lobos, The Blasters, X and more. “You just mentioned some groups I liked a lot when I was growing up,” says Dylan. “There was a lot of good stuff. Slash Records, almost anything they put out I bought back then. A lot of good music.” “Well, I don’t think there is a bad era,” he replies when I say that it must have been a great era in the city. “There’s bad groups in every era, and if that dominates people’s memory, that’s unfortunate. People think of the ‘80s, they think of hair metal. What about X and The Blasters? They were there, too.” “Now, I tell you, you can make a great documentary about California in ‘6Os, in Laurel Canyon in 1968 if you wanted to. Or you could go up north, you go to San Francisco and you do the ‘68. You could go up to Los Angeles and you can do the scene with X and The Blasters. “Every era, anywhere, I think you could probably make a really interesting documentary when it comes to music, but you do have to pick a scene. You can’t do all of it at once. You’ve got to narrow your ambition down to a particular place and maybe even a year. That’s what we tried to do. “Even more specifically, all that talent in these groups. The people weren’t really stepping out and trying to be their own stars just yet. You had Stephen Stills and Neil Young in the same group there. There was a lot of talent. The Byrds had a lot of talent. Which is also one of the reasons these bands didn’t last. “People’s egos started to develop and then the reality that is true, which is bands are really for kids to be in. Once you grow up, they just don’t make a lot of sense for most of us. It’s too complicated. But that’s the line of work that I’m in and they were doing it first, very early on. It was new to them and they were all influenced by good stuff and we’re all fortunate that we can hear the stories. That’s all you can do, is learn from these things, and it allowed me to do that going forward.” It has been nearly a decade since the last album from The Wallflowers but while Jakob Dylan had already released two solo albums he decided last year that it was time he got the band back together – or a version of the band anyway. Despite the fact that he has recorded several albums under his own name, Jakob Dylan has decided that he prefers to release a new album under the Wallflowers’ moniker – nine years after the band’s last studio album. He already enjoyed hits such as ‘6th Avenue Heartache’ and ‘One Headlight’ from the band’s 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse (produced by T Bone Burnett) and five of the Wallflowers albums had made it into the Top 50. Exit Wounds was recorded in Los Angeles at producer Butch Walker’s studio in a couple of weeks in early 2020 with a rotating cast of musicians. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne – who recorded the album Not Dark Yet (titled after the Bob Dylan song) with her sister Allison Moorer – guests on four songs. The album is full of songs with memorable hooks, great harmonies a swirling Hammond organ and Dylan’s smokey voice highlighted up front. There are also some great song titles like ‘I Hear The Ocean (When I Wanna Hear Trains)’, ‘The Dive Bar In My Heart’, ‘Who’s That Man Walking Through My Garden.’ “The Wallflowers, it’s me. It always has been,” explains Jakob when I ask him about the band. “There are times where it’s confusing to me but what people sometimes don’t realise is when they first saw us on TV with Bringing Down the Horse, that group you saw on TV, those weren’t even half the people that played on that record. “I’ve always done it and approached it that way. I’m on the ride with people for as long as it makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, we all go do something else. I don’t overthink it. I don’t think it’s a marriage. I know that if you’re in this band and playing with me, you’re probably going to have to accept that all of the energy and all of the output and the vision is going to come from me. If you need that and you want to be a part of that, you probably need a different group. I started this group. I’m allowed to do it in whichever way I want.” Musically though, a Wallflowers album is quite different to a Jakob Dylan solo album with additional instrumentation, including keyboards and, as you’d expect, a much fuller sound. “Well, it is,” agrees Dylan. “If it’s going to be a solo album, there’s no boundaries. I can do it. I can put a tuba on it if I want. I can do whatever I want. The Wallflowers has a sound, it has parameters. Sometimes it’s just noisier and it’s also something that I need to revisit at times when I want to keep it alive. “At some point there can be too much time, but I’m also confused why I do a Wallflowers record or a solo record. Essentially, they’re the same, but The Wallflowers has a sound. I don’t think my solo records inherently have a specific sound. “I think this record sounds as much like a Wallflower record as any record I’ve done. It’s because we’re following me, and my voice is up front and I’ve written the songs. If you just stay out of the way and listen to me and take direction, I can make almost anybody sound like The Wallflowers. It’s not that complicated. “The sound itself is not reinventing the wheel. The sound of The Wallflowers is something that supports the songs that I write and suits my voice, which is a very broad, big voice, you can’t bury me, you have to serve it well, and if it’s in the center and we have a similar instrumentation, it’s going to sound like The Wallflowers. It’s not that hard for me to do with a variety of different people.” One of those people is Shelby Lynne who features on the gorgeous ballad ‘Darlin’ Hold On,’ probably one of the best songs Dylan has written. I wonder aloud why Lynne has not had more success as a solo artist. “I think success is dependent on what the person wants,” responds Dylan.“I won’t speak for Shelby Lynne, but I don’t think she plays well with others. I think she’s just a pure, genuine artist. I think her career suggests that. I think that her muse and her art is most important to her. That in itself, that makes her a maverick, and mavericks don’t generally succeed in a large scale if that’s what anybody wants them to do. You can’t fit that into a square peg. I would never speak for her. I believe she could be a bigger artist if that’s what she had wanted. I have no doubt that she could do that in a heartbeat if that’s what she wanted to. I think she could do anything she wanted to do.” Because I have just finished watching the final series of Bosch, the superb detective series set in Los Angeles I suggest that the album title, Exit Wounds, very much an LA connotation. “Well, that title is very pliable, and it does lend itself to all the material on the record,” says Dylan. I look at songs that at the end of the day, end of the record, they’re going to add up to a larger picture. Not unlike scenes in a movie. “We’re all changing, we’re all transitioning. We’re all going somewhere after what we’re all going through. We’re all different forever. Exit wounds, to me, does not mean something that is meant to be an albatross or bad. When you change, those are wounds that you take with you.” Depending on what sort of bullet hits you, the exit wound can be bigger than the entry wound, can’t it? “Well, you might know more about ballistics than me. I don’t know. I also assume if you’ve got exit wounds, hopefully you’ve survived. Otherwise, I think they call that death.” The lead off song, ‘Maybe Your Heart’s Not In It Anymore’, could be about a relationship or it could be about Dylan’s career. “Well, you just said it perfect,” he notes. “It could be about anything. When you write these songs and you have a theme and an idea you want to express and explore, you often couch it in a relationship. Or maybe it’s your country. Or maybe it’s your friend, or maybe it’s your health. There could be numerous interpretations. If I’ve done the song correctly and I got over what I was trying to do, they’re all going to work.”
