NEW YORK, NY. (Top40 Charts/ Columbia Records/ Legacy Recordings) - Bob Dylan's award-winning XM music show, "Theme Time
Radio Hour," will launch its highly-anticipated third season on Wednesday, October 8 at 10:00am (ET). In what promises to be a banner week for
Bob Dylan fans, Tell Tale Signs - the 8th installment in the best-selling and critically heralded Bootleg Series which launched 1991 - is in stores, October 7.
The advance critical response to Tell Tale Signs has been overwhelmingly ecstatic:
Robert Hilburn, writing in the Los Angeles Times (September 30, 2008), observed that "Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 is a rich, revealing look at how this master songwriter put together one of the most dramatic creative renaissances in pop history... Tell Tale Signs is not just 'extra' Dylan. It's essential Dylan."
Chris Willman, giving the album an "A" review in Entertainment Weekly (September 30, 2008), made this analysis: "Excitingly, Tell Tale Signs jumps decades ahead to offer an alternate history of ... the creative renaissance that started at the end of the 1980s and has been bearing fruit ever since... the generally superb Tell Tale Signs repurposes known material in simple, languid, semi-acoustic settings that hark back to '70s classics like Blood on the Tracks."
"...Tell Tale Signs is less an anthology than an album in its own right," writes Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone. "It seems designed to tell a story that sharpens and expands the vista of mortal and cultural disintegration that has been the chief theme of 1997's Time Out of Mind, 2001's 'Love and Theft', and 2006's Modern Times - perhaps the most daring music he's ever made. Tell Tale Signs makes plain that Dylan knows the caprices of the world he lives in, now more than ever."
A treasure-trove of 27 songs spanning two discs, Tell Tale Signs features previously unreleased recordings and alternate versions of tracks from sessions which generated some of Bob Dylan's most acclaimed and commercially successful albums from the last two decades, including Time Out Of Mind, "Love And Theft", Modern Times and Oh Mercy. A limited-edition deluxe three-CD package of Tell Tale Signs - featuring all of the elements of the two-disc set, plus an exclusive bonus disc of 12 additional rare and unreleased recordings and a hardcover book of Bob Dylan singles artwork spanning his entire career, presented in a specially-designed hardcover slipcase - is also available now.
Bob Dylan's weekly radio program will air on Deep Tracks XM channel 40 on Wednesdays at 10:00 am (ET), The Village XM channel 15 at 12:00 pm (ET) and all day every Wednesday on XMX XM channel 2, the channel showcasing XM's most popular and critically-acclaimed original music shows all in one place.
Themes on season three of "Theme Time Radio Hour" will include "Money," "War," "Presidents," "Cats" and "Famous People."
"Theme Time Radio Hour," an hour-long radio program hosted by Bob Dylan, has been described as "revelatory" by Rolling Stone magazine. Each episode features an eclectic mix of songs, from a wide variety of musical genres, related to that week's theme with Dylan's on-air thoughts and commentary interspersed with phone calls, email readings, contributions from special guests and an array of classic radio IDs, jingles and promos from the past.
"To listen to 'Theme Time Radio Hour' is to rediscover the sense of musical adventure that old-fashioned disc jockeys with strongly individual personalities offered in the days before big-money stations pinned their fiscal hopes to the rigid Top 40-style playlists that took the fun out of radio," observed Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal.
Bob Dylan is one of the world's most popular and acclaimed songwriters, musicians and performers, having sold more than 110 million albums and performed literally thousands of shows around the world in a career spanning five decades. His most recent studio album, Modern Times - lauded by critics around the world and selling more than 2.5 million copies to date - entered the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart at No 1, as well as debuting within the Top Five in 21 other countries. His previous studio albums, Time Out Of Mind and "Love & Theft", have been among his most commercially successful and critically lauded, each having sold more than a million copies and earning Grammy nominations for Album Of The Year (Time Out Of Mind won that award in 1998).
In 2001, he received a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best song from a motion picture for "Things Have Changed" from the movie Wonder Boys. Dylan's Chronicles - Volume I, his recent memoirs released in October, 2004, was a world-wide best seller, spending 19 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List. He was awarded a 'special citation' Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
Bob Dylan remains one of the world's top touring artists, performing more than 100 concerts yearly around the globe.
