After the Empire: 15 songs – the recording and tracing the composer(s)

Information supplied by Dr Leo Ensel, commentary by Tony Attwood

“After the Empire” is a collection of 15 studio recordings made by Bob Dylan as he tried out new material in his usual style, with the band having to work out what Bob wants as they go on.   But these are of course perfect musicians, so by and large they understand what the master wants.

I was thinking of adding this CD to each of the reviews that we have already done of the songs but I thought in the end that it really needed a piece of its own with links back, just in case you really want to know what we thought of the song when we first found it.

But if you do follow these links you will find some of the links to the recordings are now broken, so you will have to use these…  And you will notice that some of the songs don’t have a link, which seems to suggest we haven’t actually reviewed them – probably because at the time we felt they were not written by Dylan.

And it is also quite possible that we’ve got those songs listed under other titles – so now it is time to try and resolve all this.

But meanwhile what is interesting is that we really did Bob’s technique of working out the song with the band.  Here’s the list

1. Baby coming back from  the dead
2. Nothing here worth dying for
3. Won’t go back
4. Let me come baby
5. Bring it home to me
6. I’ve ready for love
7. 26 Storeys High
8. You can  have her
9. My sweet baby (Round and Around)
10. Nothing here worth dying for
11. You can have her
12. Find me
13. Nothing here worth dying for
14. You can have her
15. Right hand road blues
16. That’s all (probably not written by Dylan)

One of the key things to resolve is if “You can have her”. “My sweet baby” and “That’s all” were written by Dylan.   I’ve already added the note to “That’s all” is not a Dylan song, but I am going to have to do some further digging to find out who did write it.

So I am hoping you might be able to supply some information on those songs  – but if you can, please may I make a further request.   Please don’t just say XYZ was or was not written by Dylan, but do tell us how you know it was or was not written by him.  A citation from an article with some evidence will do.

Thus a bit of a work in progress, but hopefully you can enjoy the album if you have not heard it before, and maybe provide a bit of evidence about the songs that we have not resolved.

Meanwhile I’ll add a note to our Facebook page to see if anyone there can help.  If you are not one of the 11,000+ people who are members of the group, you can find us by typing into your search engine Untold Dylan Facebook.

And of course if you’d like  to write an article for Untold Dylan we’d love to hear from you.  Just email Tony@schools.co.uk